A nice thing for a GSoD student to do would be to organize a documentation sprint.
Jason moorepants.info +01 530-601-9791 On Thu, Aug 6, 2020 at 5:32 PM Matthew Brett <matthew.br...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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 are somewhat outdated and they are on the first results in a web search.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 > . > -- 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/CAP7f1AiY4Tn9nY%3DXS41Tj4ZL9NZFKKDBcYpQDYbYeWjdpzSH3w%40mail.gmail.com.
