I declare defeat: rolling back to Maple 9.5
566As a direct result of the tab indentation nuisance reported in the three threads
today I have rolled back my system from Maple 11 to Maple 9.5: I have spend quite some time today manually going through all the Maple documents which have been contaminated by loads and loads of XML codes which Maple 11 produces.
I should say, that this decision of mine has been taken after having spend some days experimenting with external text editors, as suggested by several in the last thread above, and having concluded that even though it is indeed technically possible to work that way it does just not tally with my way of using Maple.
So after having spend a lot of money upgrading from Maple 9.5 to Maple 11, and after having had my research disrupted for six weeks by these distractions, which have been forced upon me because MapleSoft decided to release a faulty product, I am finally back where I started.
Way to go, MapleSoft!
- A procedure
2 hours 32 min ago - ellipse
3 hours 55 min ago - Also try the options scaling, gridrefine and crossingrefine
5 hours 12 min ago - Try implicitplot
5 hours 55 min ago - The patch
7 hours 31 min ago - thx!
7 hours 57 min ago - The source of the bug
8 hours 15 min ago - my concern is ...
9 hours 11 min ago - plotting with the "Standard interface"
9 hours 30 min ago - variant
9 hours 48 min ago
What platform are you on?
If you are on Windows or Linux, have you considered using Classic instead of Standard? That is what many of the old-timers on mapleprimes use for their daily work, many for reasons similar to yours: Classic does not 'get in the way' of doing work with the underlying Maple, while Standard still has glitches (even in worksheet mode) that can make it bothersome to use for someone who is not a beginner.
Classic interface
Thanks for your suggestion on using the Classic interface, but I think I have closed completely the door on Maple 11 for two reasons:
So, I suppose, no future upgrade on my behalf will be undertaken, unless MapleSoft can give me a money-back-guarantee that these XML generated nuisances have been removed.
Classic pro and cons
For this reason I would like very much to use Classic for daily work, but this work frequently involves plots, which, because of the problem reported here, and earlier elsewhere, look bad in 2D and horrible in 3D.
(Note: I have not found yet any other application showing this same problem, ie it seems Maple specific).
And the speed of plotting in M11 Standard (worksheet) has improved wrt M10 Standard. So, while in Windows, most of the times I choose Standard GUI despite of its very slow start and its glitches.
It seems that the development of the Classic GUI is frozen (or close to). I wonder which is its future.
Classic future
Classic GUI is completely frozen - only Standard gets active development.
And Standard M11 starts faster than previous versions... but it's still too slow for my taste. Personally, I installed Eclipse (a development environment), started it, waited for way too long, so I shut it down and uninstalled it. Same with Sun's IDE. The only reason I did not do the same with VisualStudio was that I needed it to compile a project for my course (although for VS, if I got a slightly faster computer, that would not be a problem, while it would not have solved Eclipse's problem).
eclipsed
I hear you on Eclipse; I installed it once to see what the fuss was about, but once I saw how slow it was coming up, I immediately canned it. Of course, I likely wouldn't have kept it anyway, but I would have had less reason.
Java based
Eclipse is Java based - still, it works (and looks) much smoother than Standard Maple. Java is Java though - slow, buggy, and ugly.
_______________
Alec Mihailovs
Maplesoft Member
Not Java per se
The problem here is not the "programming language" Java, but rather its library. In particular, both AWT and Swing are so bad that the Eclipse Foundation created its own set of user interface widgets from scratch. These work a fair bit better, but they are still not great - nowhere near what is available on any native platform.
Standard Maple, AFAIK, uses Swing. From what I can tell, that seems to be the real source of problems. Even Sun knows this is an issue - Swing is essentially Java 1.2, even though Java itself took a great leap forward with 1.5 (and is now at 1.6), unfortunately Swing has not kept up. My impression is that it is a doomed technology, and people who still use Java use the Eclipse stuff instead.
Java choices
Swing is bad, but AWT was much worse - it created a window for every button, or other element, for instance - as a result, it used much more memory. I used to program in Java myself (and teach Java programming) - and, frankly, I don't think that Java has any future, except, maybe for 5-6 years while people taught only Java and nothing else in college, learn something else.
_______________
Alec Mihailovs
Maplesoft Member
Crystal ball
My crystal ball tells me that C# has a good short-term future (C# 3.0 has some fantastic features in it), and that the languages to watch out for are F# and Scala. They strike a really good balance between clean design a being pragmatic.
There are much better languages out there, but their fundamental problem is that most assume more intelligence than the average programmer seems to possess.
I fondly remember a talk by the 'creator' of Javascript at a programming language conference. His first slide? "I'm sorry" in big bold letters. His talk was extremely well received.
F#
I agree. I use C# a lot, and F# is one of my favorite things to play with. It looks as if F# is one of the best possible choices for writing a new CAS, if there was such a demand. At present, it seems as if SAGE (and Python) dominate though - it would need a serious effort (say 50 to 100 capable people for a year or two) to create something (in CAS area) that could approach that (I don't think that SAGE and Python could be beaten in a year or 2).
_______________
Alec Mihailovs
Maplesoft Member
Customer interface
Returning to John Fredsted's point, one small problem with the Maple 11.01's standard interface has driven him to abandon Maple 11 and with it the physics package which, I imagine, could have been very useful to him.
The standard worksheet mode interface should be well out of the development stage by now - it's been around since Maple 9. But John is not alone in complaining about this interface in Maple 11.
Of course one can use editors to produce Maple code. But Maple makes the point that its GUI allows one to solve problems in an interactive environment as opposed to traditional off-line coding (or at least it did in earlier releases). Surely, that is one of its great attractions for colleges and schools.
Instead of pursuing the dire document mode, Maplesoft should make sure the basic worksheet interface is as near perfect it as can be. After all, that's what connects its customers to its product. And look at what it did to one of its customers.
J. Tarr
Thanks
Thank you for saying that.
some more
may be it is also a personal taste, but i find that 'standard' disgusting (sorry for the harsh word) - it even prevents me to use most of the downloadable files
when i considered switched from occasionally using Mupad to Maple and that standard would have been the only one - i would never had done it
so i like using Maple - i really HATE that nerve-shattering interface (nicer looking, yes ... but how about to fresh up the real interface?)
ok, enough ranting ... time for a beer :-)
open source native GUI?
If Classic is frozen (and I am afraid that it will not be distributed, starting from some future version), I wonder whether an open source native GUI project makes (technically) sense with core Maple being closed code.
Eg., could it work that Maplesoft opensource the Classic GUI if it were no longer interested in distributing it?
Open sourcing 'Classic' GUI
You know, that just might work! Maplesoft derives too much "competitive" advantage [see their marketing] from Standard to easily allow the outside world to look at that. It also derives some competitive advantage from parts of the kernel and library. But there is no competitive advantage to be gained from Classic! That is one component which could be open-sourced without doing harm to the business side [if someone can argue that it would do harm to the business side to open source it, then that same argument should mean that Classic should be improved, which it isn't; that status quo is already 'doing harm' to Classic].
Be warned though: there is a reason maintenance of Classic was abandoned...
socket and handshake problem
In Maple, interfaces connect with the kernel through a socket using a secret handshake preventing other programs (including those on other computers) to connect to it. I don't see how that can be made open source.
_______________
Alec Mihailovs
Maplesoft Member
Not so secret anymore
It is now essentially documented, through OpenMaple, which uses the same protocols. It is all done through INTERFACE_ 'messages', whose origin in the libray can be looked at, and if Classic was open-sourced, then we could see how at least the old messages are received.
Why Maple 9.5?
I understand the idea - but why Maple 9.5? It had the same (or even worse) Standard Java interface.
_______________
Alec Mihailovs
Maplesoft Member