On Lisp you can jump into Common Lisp from Maxima in a breeze. Better with SBCL ...

ethernot · 2024-12-07T15:18:31 1733584711

But Maxima, which is horrifying buggy.

sourcepluck · 2024-12-07T17:02:57 1733590977

Hmm, I was using it fairly heavily while going through a book which required loads of messing with graphs last year for a month maybe and I don't remember it acting up... Perhaps I got lucky? Is it known to be buggy, in general?

ethernot · 2024-12-07T22:08:24 1733609304

Yes it's terribly buggy. Incorrect answers sometimes depending on release versions and solve gets stuck all the time. I tend to use Xcas/GIAC instead where I can. Also bundled on my calculator (HP Prime).

It's so bad that the university I "loosely associate" with have their own patched version to fix a load of problems with it.

sourcepluck · 2024-12-08T19:22:21 1733685741

Hmm ok, shoot. I hope someone comes and cleans it up with one day, a historically significant piece of software, I would say.

ethernot · 2024-12-08T21:33:37 1733693617

Indeed. The problem is that there is no regression suite clearly. Sometimes things get broken and then have to be fixed again. You end up in situation where you need to tell a person to use a specific version and hope they know how to get it working.

This makes communication, which is a really big part of mathematics, extremely difficult.

anthk · 2024-12-07T18:02:45 1733594565

WxMaxima? For sure. Plain Maxima/XMaxima/Maxima.el it's megastable.

ethernot · 2024-12-07T22:07:10 1733609230

Stable yes. Buggy yes. There are all sorts of problems it gets stuck on. solve() is terrible.

anthk · 2024-12-08T06:31:07 1733639467

Which Common Lisp interpreter/compiler did you use?

ethernot · 2024-12-08T10:54:37 1733655277

SBCL shipped via homebrew.

SBCL is fine. It's Maxima that is full of bugs.

ethernot · 2024-12-08T13:02:50 1733662970

I love how I get downvoted for every negative comment about this rather than an actual rebuttal of the issues.

It's fucking shit. I hate every moment using Maxima. I'd rather pay for Mathematica but my org is too cheap for that. There you. Enjoy :)

Even better, I'd rather do it by hand!

anthk · 2024-12-08T19:11:47 1733685107

Fricas it's another CAS based on Common Lisp.

BTW, the current SBCL versions are much better than the stable/oldstable releases such as the ones for Debian or Ubuntu LTS.

Try Fricas, you might like it too.

On Maxima, beware, because your package manager might ship you a Maxima version built with generic and unnoptimized CL compilers.

GNU CLisp's performance against SBCL it's abysmal. On an n270 netbook, MCClim widgets built from Ultralisp (QuickLisp repo) run in realtime with SBCL. ECL it's a bit beter, closer to SBCL than CLISP. CLISP fails to compile due the lack of threading support on 32 bit. And even if it ran MCClim, it would run visibily redrawing widgets like Win32 ones under a Pentium as they did back in the day.

ethernot · 2024-12-08T19:17:36 1733685456

Thanks for the suggestion - will look into it tomorrow.

Not performance heavy here. What I do require is something that is less buggy though. Maxima has zero to no test suite so there are regularly stupid regressions that break everything.

ketralnis · 2024-12-10T02:08:59 1733796539

> I love how I get downvoted for every negative comment about this rather than an actual rebuttal of the issues.

It's because you haven't mentioned any issues. Just said it's terrible and buggy. Nobody can debug that for you based on that description. If they haven't experienced the same "issues", the best they can say is "nuh uh".