As someone who is facing the choice between sympy and maxima, I am finding myself asking how much risk there is that the time invested in learning the CAS will end up being wasted because of deficiencies, bugs, lack of documentation and lack of support. All these things depend on the developers and how they are motivated. So for example, although scikit-learn is free (as in beer), it is supported by a consortium. Sympy is not, as far as I know, therefore the developers, as many as there are, are all motivated to learning programming skills and not necessarily the quality of documentation and support. And maxima, although not conveniently integrated via python, is based on a government financed project so I have some circumstantial guarantee that it is a solid piece of software.
This is my impressionistic opinion, and if I am incorrect on any (assumed) facts, I welcome any corrections. On Monday, January 12, 2015 at 4:07:43 PM UTC-8, bastian.weber wrote: > > Sorry if this post might be slightly offtopic, > > Situation: > > A (generalized) colleague is working on a book. Intended audience are > graduate students of electrical engineering. The book treats concepts > like vector fields, differential forms, (linear and nonlinear) > coordinate transforms, null spaces, etc. The author wants to provide > some "illustrations" of the treated concepts by means of short > computer-algebra snippets. Currently he uses maxima. > > From my point of view, the combination of IPython notebook and sympy > would be a better choice. So I am collecting arguments, which should be > covered by reliable information, to finally convince him (in the best > case). > > Status: Until now I only found > > [1] https://github.com/sympy/sympy/wiki/SymPy-vs.-Maxima > > which seems to be quite neutral, i.e., it does not reflect my personal > experience that the usage of sympy is much more intuitive. > > > Questions: > > 1. Are there any documents available, comparing sympy and maxima in > terms of: > > a) features ([1] does this on a quite abstract level) > b) development activity > c) community size > d) documentation coverage > e) test coverage > f) subjective "usability experience" (maybe internal consistency, module > compatibility) > > > 2. What would be other arguments for/against Sympy (together with > IPNotebook and Python)? > > I started to collect my thoughts here: > > [2] https://github.com/basweber/sympy/wiki/sympy_vs_maxima > > Best regards, > > Bastian > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sympy" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/sympy. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sympy/3cee297c-2232-4e3e-9c4f-b639af6aebce%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
