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Comment by jxy | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't seem like anybody is actively working on it: https://github.com/daly/axiom/commits/master/

The only open source CAS that has survived for half a century seems to be maxima. The development seems to be active: https://sourceforge.net/p/maxima/code/ci/master/tree/ But, yeah, it's still on sourceforge.

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REDUCE is here: https://reduce-algebra.sourceforge.io

The first published paper about REDUCE is from 1967, work on REDUCE started slightly earlier: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2402536.2402544

The first expressions of its Lisp implementation were written roughly 60 years ago.

Scratchpad lives on in FriCAS https://github.com/fricas/fricas/commits/master/ which has commits 18 hours ago. Tim Daly worked diligently on Axiom for years. However some of his changes, like requiring every single file be literate code and complete refusal to compromise, turned decades of IBM research into an isolated dumpster fire; good luck getting it to build/run anywhere outside his Docker container. I'm reasonably happy with FriCAS since it's based on the same software and is much more open source normative, while possessing capabilities Maxima users could only dream of. See also https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/axiom-developer/2007-0... and https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/axiom-developer/2007-0... for evidence of his leadership style.

FriCas seems to be quite light in documentation?

There's a 990 page book linked on the home page: https://fricas.github.io/book.pdf

Also built-in help with ")help ...": https://fricas.github.io/help.html

Thanks! Somehow didn't find that.

Tried this command from their intro:

    draw(5*besselJ(0,sqrt(x^2+y^2)), x=-20..20, y=-20..20)

On macos, it says "transmitting data", but nothing shows. Will visit again if/when out of Beta, it would be great to have a working version of Axiom.

See https://fricas.github.io/, which includes a 990 page book and detailed documentation.

I use Maxima regularly as it was what I was taught at university. It is updated regularly. It's cranky as hell but it works. Sometimes I use the CAS on my calculator, mostly to check my own work, because it hurts less. That's an HP Prime with Giac/Xcas on it.

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