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ran into this myself just today, but with Symbolics.jl instead of SymPy. I just needed an algebra scratchpad, and Symbolics was.. barren. and uninviting. I thou
by sterlind 4y ago
ran into this myself just today, but with Symbolics.jl instead of SymPy. I just needed an algebra scratchpad, and Symbolics was.. barren. and uninviting. I thought of reaching for Mathematica but resorted to pencil and paper, like a barbarian.
same deal with solvers more generally. the coin-or stuff (e.g. Cbc) is slow and buggy, Cplex and Gurobi are far better but very expensive. where are the PhDs in this field? what are they building?
- logicchains 4y ago>I just needed an algebra scratchpad, and Symbolics was.. barren. and uninviting. I thought of reaching for Mathematica but resorted to pencil and paper, like a barbarian. Have you tried Maxima? It seems more ergonomic.
- anthk 4y agoI use Maxima on a Atom N270 netbook. It works greatly, fast and usable. Gnuplot for plotting, and I'm done.
- sfriedr 4y ago> I thought of reaching for Mathematica but resorted to pencil and paper, like a barbarian. A very computer-science perspective with the obligatory dose of hubris. Pencil and paper is continuing to serve a much older, much more consolidated discipline (mathematics) well for... ever since paper was invented.
- sterlind 4y agothe barbarian bit was tongue-in-cheek. it's just that symbolic algebra is one of those old-school, classic use cases for computers, like playing chess or guiding missiles or scheduling routes. I enjoy those kinds of moments.
- bowsamic 4y agoSympy is good as a scratchpad I think. For my case I needed minimal state space realisations of MIMO transfer matrices. In mathematica this is just two functions. Implementing this in Python could take months