On Sun, 29 Jul 2007, Alasdair McAndrew wrote:
It may be that the negative views of Axiom are simply due to Axiom
being very poorly (read "not at all") marketed - there are no
elementary books about the use of Axiom, and if you go to the Axiom
website, it is hard to find introductory beginner's or tutorial
articles.
IMHO the problem are not tutorials, but reference.
)di op operator
)sh domain
are nice but only helpful for the expert.
Somehow the ++ documentation present in the algebra files should make it
to the terminal as well.
I held a "computer mathematics" class for first year mathematics students
last year, which was meant to give the students an overview over available
computer tools, presenting latex, maple, mathematica, matlab/octave, and
axiom.
Before handing out individual homework assignments at the end, I
circulated a list and asked them to tell me their favourite CAS.
Out of 44 students, I got the following distribution:
Maple 30
Mathematica 2
Octave 10
Axiom 2
The main argument for maple was the extensive help system with many useful
examples and the vast number of examples available on the web (well this
is another bootstrap problem ...); and of course in the first year maple
is the most useful system for symbolic linear algebra.
Another problem - which I see as major - is that there is no native
windows version with documentation (HyperDoc) and graphics.
This is indeed a major problem.
I was surprised that even in this audience, where I expect computer
literacy to be above average, out of 44 students only 2 were not using
windows ... 1 Mac, 1 Linux.
In the end at least one of them installed linux just because of axiom ...
regards,
Franz
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