RE: [Axiom-mail] FW: [Maxima]

[Page, Bill]

Chris,

On Tuesday, August 31, 2004 7:32 AM you wrote:
> 
> I confess, it was me who tried the MathAction interface.
> I hope you don't mind.

"don't mind"??? Are you kidding? PLEASE try it. PLEASE,
PLEASE try it! Getting people to use or even think about
it this has been very difficult. I get reactions like:
Gee, that looks really good... They *might* try it once
and then nothing. I am at a bit of a loss to understand
this since I personally think that the collaborative
web interface is easy to use and should be very useful to
almost everyone.

Some days I think perhaps many people have some kind of
mental block against using the Web as an interactive
environment. Perhaps we are now so programmed to think
of the web browser as a one-way means of retrieving
information, that it is hard to conceive of using it for
two-way communication and as an interface to collaborative
programs. In fact, even without the LateX and Axiom interface,
I have had some trouble trying to convince people to use
the other wikis that I have implemented for other projects.
So I have started to wonder a little about the psychology
involved ...

> 
> I have been working on a computer aided assessment system
> using Maxima.  I'm interested in how you have connected
> Axiom to the internet, since I've done a similar thing
> with Maxima.

I would be glad to tell you in detail how the LatexWiki
interface to Axiom and Reduce works. All of the code
is available in the online archive at

  http://page.axiom-developer.org

If you ask me questions about it, it will help me do
more of the documentation.

I would like to include Maxima along with Axiom and
Reduce, but I am not really familiar with Maxima and
am having a little trouble with the concept of executing
groups of commands (as opposed to one command at a time).

Can you give me a link to the work that you are doing
with Maxima?

> 
> I think the response to your post, and other posts on the 
> Maxima mailing list, show that getting CAS integrated
> with other applications is very much a topic "in the air".
> Lots of people seem to be doing very similar things....!

Great. I think we need to exchange ideas and information.

Cheers,
Bill Page.