Ralf wrote: > Compilation doesn't take so long anyway, but making it even shorter is, of > course, better. Actually, that makes me wonder... isn't ANT checking the > modification times of the files and compiles only as necessary? I would > consider it bad design if ANT doesn't have this facility.
Ant indeed only compiles as necessary, but the *ant task cleans the build directory and then compiles everything from scratch. > But FriCAS is hard to enter with or without a good front-end. And > unfortunately this will stay so for a long time. > > FriCAS is (in my eyes) pretty much algebra focused. In order to really see > its potential, one has to know at least a bit of common algebraic concepts. > That's probably not something one can "sell" in a highschool. But who knows, > perhaps some bright student gets interested. Would be nice to get more > attention, but I am not a marketing guy and one should not lie to people. > FriCAS has a steep learning curve. That's a fact. For newcomers, it's hard > to see the beauty before investing some time. During the year I was with the Sage project, my main focus was on education and marketing. I devoted a significant amount of time trying to figure out ways to get Sage used in high schools and MathPiperIDE (which use to be called SageIDE) was created to help with this effort. I eventually concluded that it was infeasible to have Sage used as a student's first CAS in significant numbers because of its steep learning curve. I also concluded that it was infeasible to have PanAxiom or Maxima (or Mathematica, Maple, etc.) used as a first CAS in significant numbers for the same reason. So that is when I came up with the idea of using an entry-level learning CAS as a way to have students learn the fundamental programming and CAS skills they need to then go on to learn a professional-level CAS. MathPiper is that entry-level learning CAS and this past year we tested MathPiper with high school students and college freshman and it was very successful. Sometime this Fall we will officially announce MathPiper and start actively marketing it. Something that will help with this marketing effort is that GeoGebra (http://geogebra.org) uses MathPiper as its main CAS and GeoGebra is coming out with an very entry level CAS called GeoGebraCAS which uses MathPiper as its computation engine. GeoGebra has over 100,000 users world-wide and when GeoGebraCAS is released, MathPiper should get a significant amount of exposure from this. But MathPiper was designed to be a stepping stone to a professional-level CAS and I am still in the process of determining which one it should be so that it can benefit from the marketing effort we will be starting soon. FriCAS would be a good fit for this professional-level CAS, especially since both MathPiper and FriCAS are Lisp-based and we plan on teaching the more advanced MathPiper students about Lisp. However, I would like to know if the FriCAS team is interested in having this amount of exposure for FriCAS? Supporting a significant amount of users is difficult and distracting, so perhaps you would prefer to keep a mostly low profile? Ted -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "FriCAS - computer algebra system" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/fricas-devel?hl=en.
