Sorry if this post might be slightly offtopic,
Situation:
A (generalized) colleague is working on a book. Intended audience are
graduate students of electrical engineering. The book treats concepts
like vector fields, differential forms, (linear and nonlinear)
coordinate transforms, null spaces, etc. The author wants to provide
some "illustrations" of the treated concepts by means of short
computer-algebra snippets. Currently he uses maxima.
From my point of view, the combination of IPython notebook and sympy
would be a better choice. So I am collecting arguments, which should be
covered by reliable information, to finally convince him (in the best case).
Status: Until now I only found
[1]
https://github.com/sympy/sympy/wiki/SymPy-vs.-Maxima
which seems to be quite neutral, i.e., it does not reflect my personal
experience that the usage of sympy is much more intuitive.
Questions:
1. Are there any documents available, comparing sympy and maxima in
terms of:
a) features ([1] does this on a quite abstract level)
b) development activity
c) community size
d) documentation coverage
e) test coverage
f) subjective "usability experience" (maybe internal consistency, module
compatibility)
2. What would be other arguments for/against Sympy (together with
IPNotebook and Python)?
I started to collect my thoughts here:
[2]
https://github.com/basweber/sympy/wiki/sympy_vs_maxima
Best regards,
Bastian