Something that will help with this marketing effort is that GeoGebra
(http://geogebra.org) uses MathPiper as its main CAS
Yep, I heard that. Interestingly, Markus Hohenwarter is now professor
here in Linz.
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.
Although Lisp is still the underlying engine that drives the system, I
don't think that it is very much important for working with FriCAS. We
have SPAD and people should rather study a fully typed language than
being concerned with low level lisp stuff.
To not misunderstand my words. I think that lisp has a big value. It is
for programming what set theory is for mathematics. Understanding these
principles is certainly a good thing. But FriCAS is different to most
other CAS that it does not rely on an expression tree as a data
structure. FriCAS is much more complex. Polynomials are polynomials they
can live in any representation the programmer chooses and not just
expression trees.
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?
I definitely want more users, but even more we need capable programmers.
And I think it should be made pretty clear that FriCAS is hard to learn.
I'd bet it's harder than Sage. So if someone decides to touch FriCAS
he/she should expect that full potential can only be exploited by
investing quite a big amount of time on the user site.
I don't know exactly how many people we can handle, only an experiment
might show this. I only wouldn't like to expose FriCAS to people who
simply don't understand the power of FriCAS and in the end FriCAS earns
a bad reputation. In other words, put a big warning sign. "Enter only if
you are willing to study hard." ;-)
If we get 10 people seriously interested in FriCAS that would be some
achievement. And we certainly can handle that.
Ralf
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