On 12/23/24 08:03, Ignat Insarov wrote:
Well, actually not so standard use case. jfricas exists for some
years, but initially it was very experimental with small number
of users. There are now more users and it will take some time
to make things easier and smoother.
I see. I think integrating FriCAS with Jupyter by setting up an HTTP
API was a great step forward.
True. Communication over HTTP works great and this idea and first
prototype came from Kurt Pagani. Still jfricas is experimental. It
works, but it is (not yet) an integral part of FriCAS. In fact, you must
still see it more as an add-on. It does not live inside the official
FriCAS repository.
I understand Waldek in not wanting to make jfricas the default
interface. FriCAS can be interfaced in different ways. I often use it
from Emacs via the frimacs package.
https://github.com/pdo/frimacs
It would be good if jfricas were more independent of the way in which
fricas is built, but unfortunately, that is not the case. Reality is
that (in order to use jfricas) one must (re)build fricas on top of an
SBCL that has the hunchentoot webserver built-in.
Clearly, you are right, that all of this should be documented somewhere
and in such a way that it doesn't cost too much time for people to find
out the details. Your criticism is OK, but time and manpower is always
an issue. The current state of FriCAS is still that only people that
either have a sysadmin who installs FriCAS for them or people who
desparately fight through all the details to get it working will finally
be able to run "1+1" in the interpreter.
Yes, I have seen mathematicians that would be interested to learn how to
type FriCAS commands, but have never opened an ordinary UNIX terminal.
All of this in unfortunate and should be improved. However, and here I
can only speak for myself, it is done on best effort. I do something if
it helps in my own work and then invest a little more time so that
others can use it as well. Yes, I want more people to use FriCAS, but
more than that FriCAS needs more developers. Yes, you are welcome to
propose new ideas, to propose pull requests etc. Complaining that the
FriCAS developers do badly is understandable, but that unfortunately
does not improve the situation for other people.
FriCAS will stay at a slow pace until more people see the potential of
it and are willing to make their hands dirty to improve rough edges.
I know that one doesn't get more developers without getting more users
first (and vice versa), but that is the tragedy until a good marketing
guy comes along...
So in the interest of FriCAS, let's work together even if our views may
be slightly or massively different. Code/documentation is what counts in
the end.
Ralf
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