On 9/1/07, Alasdair McAndrew wrote: > As some of you may know, this semester I am using Axiom in a > cryptography subject. I have asked my students to comment briefly > on what they like/dislike about it. Some like it, and find it "intuitive", > while others dislike it.
As a "first impression" I think this feedback is quite valuable. I wonder how these same students will feel at the end of a semester of using Axiom. Do you plan to ask them again? I would also like to know exactly what aspects of Axiom some students found "intuitive". > One comment in particular was: > > "The lack of Windows like interface make this package look and feel > second rate. The need to use )command is annoying in that the > command line is already parsed to handle the maths, the lack of > command parsing shows a lack of interest in an interface." > Actually I agree with that sentiment. I think the decision to distinguish commands by this peculiar syntactic convention was probably already "out of fashion" even at the time Axiom was originally implemented. Plus this makes it difficult to extend the user interface in a natural manner simply by writing new library code. Certainly there are some reasonable alternatives that would be more nature and extensible. It seems quite fair to claim that during most of Axiom's "nine lives" user interface was given lower priority than the implementation of mathematical algorithms. (The work that NAG did on the Techexplorer interface for Windows was an exception, unfortunately that was lost when the commercial version died.) Even the output of the Spad library compiler demonstrates this apparent "lack of interest" in user interface. As a research platform I suppose this made a certain kind of sense but for the use you are trying to make of Axiom, I think it could be a problem. > This student also complained about the lack of a native Mac version. > For a better user interface experience I would recommend using Axiom within Sage. Sage provides a browser-based notebook interface that should be familiar to most students these days. And for cryptography I think Sage's common interface to other packages like singular and gap might also be of interest. It is very easy to install the Axiom package for Sage on both Linux and Mac, though Windows is a more difficult problem - usually solved by running Linux in a virtual machine under Windows. > Just thought you'd like to know. > Thanks. I would like to know more. But apparently some people here really do not care to know. :-( The suggestion to turn these comments back on the student surely can not be of much use since it seems rather unlikely to me that cryptography students will be motivated to solve these sort problems with the Axiom user interface when there are so many other alternatives available. Regards, Bill Page. _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list Axiom-developer@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
