3 ms·

Do you believe that existing open source symbolic kernels are the limitation here, given that we can now easily (for some value of n) render the notation and th

• mncharity 2y ago
  > Do you believe [...] are the limitation here [a late reply, but...] I strikes me as having a flavor I associate with PIMs, rich text formats (eg markdown etc, and their assorted extensions), literate programming, and book writing systems. A high-dimensional sparse space of possibilities and taste and needs and nopes, which scatters effort and users, avoids critical mass, and thus discourages use and convergence. LaTeX and github-flavored markdown and pandoc and Jupyter are all achievements of convergence within multi-decade slogs. Ongoing slogs (how do you edit that LaTeX, make a book using pandoc, wrap a development process around Jupyter, etc). So yes, symbolic math is another slog. With 1970's macsyma stalling on licensing, Mathematica suing to prevent open-source implementations, and more. But I'm not sure that's a critical bottleneck here. I'm guess I'm suggesting that these wins of convergence often have long slogs not just behind, but ahead too, making it easy to overestimate the pace of future progress when looking at a collection of recent wins. Sometimes not - rust as C successor. But until time, or some famous app, creates user expectations for notes/annotations, their future looks a slog?