Re: [dev] a suckless computer algebra system

> As a personal anecdote: I was reading a good book about numerical
> computation the other day. Everything was nicely derived and all that. But
> when it came to the C library that the respected professor had developed, I
> couldn't but think: this is absolutely terrifying. I mean, the code examples
> violated practically every idiom of C; several functions took well over
> twenty parameters, numerous libc-functions were severely misused, the type
> system was a mess, and so on.
>
> - Jukka.

Do you remember which book?

You've gotten me interested in which aspects of particular software
packages you think are terrible. I'd like to take a look at them to
see if I can learn what *not* to do.

@Kris: What is it about Gnuplot that's generally awful? Plotting and
graphing seem like they'd be less complex than operations like, say,
factorization, integration, or solving systems of DEs; do you think it
would be possible to write a less-sucking plotting package? Any
thoughts on what such an undertaking would involve? I ask because you
mentioned CASs being in a class of software which might not take well
to simplification.

Best,
A.J.
Received on Fri Nov 20 2009 - 18:20:38 UTC