Re: [Axiom-developer] foreign concepts

[Bob McElrath]

Martin Rubey address@hidden wrote:
> Dear Bill,
> 
> first of all: you are doing a wonderful job.
> 
> second: I also thought about advertising axiom, BUT, from some experience I 
> had
> with close collegs, I am absolutely sure that the following things should be
> done before:

[...list of good things to do...]

Recall that this is an open source project.  We are all working in our
spare time.  If we define a set of deliverables that we deem "important"
before outsiders start flooding in, they may very well never get done.

It is very tempting to do this.  We all want the stuff we're working on
to be perfect before we show other people.  However, this attitude is a
hinderance in an open source project.

All that is required for rapid evolution is a *working* codebase.  We
can afford to attract newcomers to an unfinished project.  As long as it
*runs* (with bugs), newcomers can run into those bugs and will be
motivated to try and fix them.  So, make sure that each release
compiles, runs, and passes test cases (same for MathAction) and the
project will grow.

Release early, release often.

Given the nature of axiom, perhaps it we could put warnings in the code
that would be printed to the user in cases where axiom is returning
known-wrong results.  I don't know the difficulty of this suggestion.
Comments?

--
Cheers,
Bob McElrath [Univ. of California at Davis, Department of Physics]
    
    It is unpatriotic to question the Kleptocracy.

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