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Comment by jghn | Hacker News Reader

An anecdote regarding this bug that always cracks me up. My college roommate showed up with a shiny new pentium machine that year, and kept bragging about how awesome it was. We used some math software called Maple that was pretty intensive for PCs at the time, and he thought he was cool because he could do his homework on his PC instead of on one of the unix machines in the lab.

Except that he kept getting wrong answers on his homework.

And then he realized that when he did it on one of the unix machines, he got correct answers.

And then a few months later he realized why ....

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“some math software called Maple”. I still use a version of Maple that I bought in 1998. I found subsequent versions of it much harder to use and I've never found an open-source software that could do what it can do. I don't need anything fancy, just occasionally solve an equation or a system of equations, or maybe plot a simple function. That old copy of Maple continues to serve me extremely well.

I assume that you're familiar with Maxima? It's perhaps the most commonly used open-source CAS - there are some emerging alternatives like Sympy.

That aside, yes it's interesting that an old program from 1998 can still serve us quite well.

> Maxima

Never heard about it. BLAS, Octave, Scilab

Those are not CAS though, they are numerical software. Maxima main features are based on symbolic transformations.

I avoid anything with the "-py" suffix like the plague. It's pretty much a guarantee that anything I write today, will not run next year. I'd stick with maxima. With wxMaxima, it's actually quite nice.

The mention of Maple brings back vivid memories of freshmen year of college when the math department decided to use the software as part of instruction and no one understood how to use it. There was a near revolt by the students.

Coincidentally, I was a developer on Maple for a summer, working on definite integration and other things.

And you know a week before the semester, the TA’s were given given a copy and told to figure it out.

> were given given a copy and told to figure it out

Welcome to engineering. That's what we do. It's all we do.

But you get paid to do it, teachers are expected to do this on their off time. :-)

"You know so much about computers, it's easy for you to figure it out!"

I.e. the teachers are expected to learn the tools they want to teach the students how to use? The horror!

Because of the way you did your quote, we’ve switched from talking about the TA’s to the teachers themselves. This is sort of different, the teaching assistants don’t really have teaching goals and they usually aren’t part of the decision making process for picking what gets taught, at least where I’ve been.

Anyway, as far as “learn the tools they want to teach the students how to use” goes, I dunno, hard to say. I wouldn’t be that surprised to hear that some department head got the wrong-headed idea that students needed to learn more practical tools and skills, shit rolled downhill, and some professor got stuck with the job.

Usually professors aren’t expert tool users after all, they are there for theory stuff. Hopefully nobody is expecting to become a vscode expert by listening to some professor who uses eMacs or vim like a proper grey-beard.

A son and his father I know, both engineers, went to an aviation meet where on display was a radial aircraft engine, with cutaways. They spent a happy hour going through every bit of it to figure out what it did and how it worked. They paid to go there.

Reminds me of when I was able to climb aboard an old steam locomotive and spent a wonderful hour tracing all the pipes and tubes and controls and figuring out what they did.

A good engineering college doesn't actually teach engineering. They teach how to learn engineering. Then you teach yourself.

I've never used Maple for work, only for survival. We had a Calculus for Engineers textbook that was so riddled with errors I had to use a combination of the non-Engineering textbook and Maple to figure out wtf was going on. Bad textbook, bad prof, bad TAs and six other classes. What a mess. Those poor undergrads...

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