Hi, On Thu, Aug 6, 2020 at 4:10 PM David Bailey <d...@dbailey.co.uk> wrote: > > On 06/08/2020 00:47, Nicolas Guarin wrote: > > I agree that this would be good for the project but maybe it would be a good > idea to polish the documentation a bit. Some of the pages in the wiki are > somewhat outdated and they are on the first results in a web search. > > Assuming you are talking about the user level documentation, I very much > agree. > > If you look up even the simplest function - e.g. Sin[] - in Mathematica, you > get a simple explanation, some examples showing that it can be used with real > numbers, and that it 'knows' about special arguments such as Pi/3. > > It shows you the power series about zero and a plot of the function. It also > shows some properties of the function such as Sin[x] = -Sin[-x] etc etc. > > It also shows that Sin can be applied to complex arguments, or even to > matrices, and that it can be applied to a high precision floating point > number to deliver a high precision result. > > That same level of detail is provided for every function - right up to > complicated functions like MeijerG. Remember that for functions such as that, > the documentation is even more important because there are different > conventions as to the order,sign, etc of the arguments. > > This might appear like overkill, but it means that wherever you start you > will realise a Mathemaica function is far more than just a numerical > function. This is also true for SymPy, but the information is harder to find. > It is also easy to cut/paste from the documentation into your own code. > > Of course, the documentation is massively redundant, but I imagine that the > documentation for each function or operation would not be written from > scratch, but pulled from some kind of database of information. > > Obviously the SymPy documentation can't jump to the Mathematica standard > overnight, but maybe a student could put together some sort of framework from > which such documentation of the standard maths functions could be generated, > and start the process off - then others could contribute information that > would fit into the same scheme. > > I think that such documentation would make SymPy very much more user-friendly.
Just to say - that the Scipy Documentation Project took Numpy from fairly woeful documentation, to very good documentation, in a few months, and with a fairly small budget: http://conference.scipy.org/proceedings/SciPy2008/paper_5/ https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6879046 Cheers, Matthew -- 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 sympy+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sympy/CAH6Pt5q%3DN_Vb0Z_yM2w8nBKwFFJu8UPBO3_A0c1UeWhAKDBX%3Dg%40mail.gmail.com.
