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At least a couple of non-technical reasons: I believe Maxima was open sourced a few years earlier (1998 vs 2001) which helped it get established. Maxima was a
by blihp 6y ago
At least a couple of non-technical reasons: I believe Maxima was open sourced a few years earlier (1998 vs 2001) which helped it get established. Maxima was also supported by a rather prolific open source developer which probably helped a community coalesce around it. Axiom, on the other hand, looks like it was more of a 'throw it over the wall' open source project which only happened after it failed commercially.
- lokedhs 6y agoAxiom is also not a normal Lisp program. Maxima can be loaded using ASDF and you can hack on it like any other Lisp project. Axiom in the other hand generates Lisp code from some other format and is rather incomprehensible to someone just coming into the project. Not that Maxima is all that easy to understand either. The nature of the software makes it complicated, but there is code in there from the 60's, which carries with it some more the classic issues with Lisp code from that era, short symbol names, use of dynamic variables, etc.
- jart 6y agoAxiom is sort of like Scratchpad source code converted to Literate Programming, and since TeX is near impossible to build these days, that makes Axiom score low on the hackability scale. Fricas on the other hand is much easier to build. However a lot of the equations that are programmed into the system, are sort of like ASCII art mathematics that the system is trained to decipher. A lot of those certainly got handed down over the decades of people figuring things out at IBM.