While the concept of slow work has merit, the ideas in this manifesto are deeply flawed and lack nuance. Also the application of this manifesto to the tool above is similarly flawed.
The tool helps save time in non thinking work e.g faster representation of information.
Slow works happens after the representation of notes. Rarely during the creation of notes, creation of notes being the goal of this Stempad.
The original idea of this notebook is a new system which can reduces bad time usage e.g. writing A x A x A x A x A. becomes A^5
The tool allows representation of ideas quicker. This means there's more time for important work, more time for slow work mentioned in the last paragraph of that manifesto.
Points in regards to the flaws of this manifesto:
To use the same framework of the initial statement to show flaws in thinking:
>We are scientists. We don't blog. We don't twitter. We take our time.
We are experts. We don't reflect online. We don't communicate online. We take our time.
If the quote said:
We are scientists. We protect our time to focus on important work. We choose to not engage in shallow discourse. And value depth over speed even at the cost of time. We believe speed for speed's sake comes at a cost.
Then there is a leg to stand upon to protect "slow work".
>Slow science was pretty much the only science conceivable for hundreds of years; today, we argue, it deserves revival and needs protection. Society should give scientists the time they need, but more importantly, scientists must _take_ their time.
Slow science is not defined in any way, and so prevents discussion and debate.
Something being the only conceivable option does not mean it was the best option. Nor does the time span it existed give the process extra value. For millennia humans used 2 legs for our primary mode of transport.
There is no movement to protect the usage of slow transport -
"Walking was pretty much the only transported conceivable for hundreds of years; today, we argue, it deserves revival and needs protection. Society should give humans time to walk to destinations, but more importantly, humans must take their time"
I agree science does need time to think, explore and discuss, but it does not need time to express ideas using AxAxAxAxA when tools such as Stempad exist to write A^5.
It is good that the actual scientists aren’t going to do this task.
It is a shame that we’ve more or less given up on the idea of having science communicators to do that job.
IMO when journalism ended the worst side-effect was that people who would be otherwise employed actually doing things have had to start blogging about the fact that they were doing them, instead of actually doing them.
I like maxima and used to use it (through the interface wxmaxima or KDE Cantor) for solving my physics problem. I am no expert in CAS, just use them for simple problem solving.
“Maxima gets elementary math wrong, it knows very little about integration, it is weak on simplifying expressions, it fails on trivial equations, it is slow, Maxima usage is discouraged by CAS power users. In summary: do not go and waist your time or wreck your nerves using Maxima. JUST DON'T DO IT”
Since this was in 2015, I want to know the situation now, and the comments of experts on the issues raised by the blog poste.
I’m a bit suspicious of the section saying “Maxima is slow” blaming linked lists. Maxima is built on Common Lisp which definitely has arrays and vectors, so the claims made there seem a bit uninformed. I don’t really know enough math to judge the rest, though.
I'm extremely suspicious of that explanation. It would be nice to see a few benchmarks.
Anectote time: I used Mathematica many years ago. One surprising thing was that when you update the content of a vector, Mathematica creates a new vector and copies the content of the old vector. If you just copy an algorithm from C to Mathematica, it may be N times slower because it's creating a lot of intermediate vectors. So you must rewrite your code using "fold", or something like that. It was a long time ago, so I'm not sure if they have already added some trick to optimize code from people like me that don't know what they are doing. If Mathematica or Maxima has this trick but the other doesn't, it may cause a huge difference of time between algorithm that look very similar. Anyway, this is totally unrelated to lists.
Checked the examples and Maxima still fails. It's even more disheartening that author mentions towards the end that had reported those issues years before they wrote the article. I had also used Maxima before and, though unsurprisingly found it less polished than Mathematica, got the job done without issues. But will probably refrain from recommending it. Would also like to see how other systems tackle those examples.
I checked the failing limt one and it worked fine. Maybe it was fixed recently?
;;; Loading #P"/usr/lib/ecl-21.2.1/sb-bsd-sockets.fas"
;;; Loading #P"/usr/lib/ecl-21.2.1/sockets.fas"
Maxima 5.46.0 https://maxima.sourceforge.io
using Lisp ECL 21.2.1
Distributed under the GNU Public License. See the file COPYING.
Dedicated to the memory of William Schelter.
The function bug_report() provides bug reporting information.
(%i1) declare(a,real);
(%o1) done
(%i2) declare(b,real);
(%o2) done
(%i3) assume(a>b,b>0);
(%o3) [a > b, b > 0]
(%i4) limit(log(b-a+%i*eta),eta,0,plus);
(%o4) log(a - b) + %i %pi
(%i5) limit(log(b-a+%i*eta),eta,0,minus);
(%o5) log(a - b) - %i %pi
Version I've installed is 5.45.1 and gets "log(b - a) + %i %pi" and "log(b - a) - %i %pi", so should be. Gave changelog for 5.46.0 a look but not sure whether it had a direct fix for this or was indirectly fixed due to one of the other closed bugs.
My university course uses Maxima for optimization modules and essentially none of the examples from the textbook work as they should. Official documentation is sparse and often unhelpful too. The functions output Lisp stacktraces if you do something wrong, rather than actually catching errors and printing some human-friendly message that describes the problem and which particular argument caused it without having to dig into Maxima source code. It would be great CAS software if it was a bit more polished, but unfortunately that is unlikely to ever change - it hasn't in the last 4 years that I've used it at least.
Somewhat related: I've read before that the FOSS CAS Axiom has the only kinda complete implementation of the Risch algorithm for integration. Axiom looks harder to use, but maybe it's an option.
The axiom implementation isn't complete either and doesn't handle mixed algebraic transcendental functions like sqrt(atan(x)), from what I understand.
The Sympy implementation handles the purely transcendental case and does best effort on the algebraic extensions. It's a lot more ergonomic than fricas/axiom though.
> in my family there has been a simple question being raised for as many years i can remember but there has never been a satisfactory answer yet
if that is the case you should read to Malek Bannabi[1]: The Conditions of Renaissance, Question of Ideas in Muslim World, The Ideological Struggle in Third World Countries ...
No, while reports like this are sadly still pretty common there's also other strains in academia that are open to collaboration between groups and welcome it. The advice you replied to likely highly depends on where you work and who you work for.
> We are scientists. We don’t blog. We don’t twitter. We take our time.