Re: Re: Some bugs in Mathematica - Documentation
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg59394] Re: [mg59379] Re: [mg59188] Some bugs in Mathematica - Documentation
- From: "David Park" <djmp at earthlink.net>
- Date: Mon, 8 Aug 2005 03:34:42 -0400 (EDT)
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
I consider Mathematica to be a very high quality product. I would even go so far as to call it a cultural jewel of our age, which sets the quality bar quite high. WRI has made tremendous efforts on documentation and overall has done a good job. But 'documentation' at WRI is like 'safety' at NASA. You can never overestimate its importance. In this regard it might be useful if the mathematicians and theoretical people at WRI did have more responsibility for the documentation. They are in a better position to check it for accuracy and clarity. Also, in many cases, the documentation could be improved by considering examples that were more commonly used by typical users. To present an analogy: right now I am reading Penrose's book 'The Road to Reality'. This book has some of the best graphics, most of it hand drawn, that I have ever seen in a technical book. They have great innovation and clarity. Penrose did not just fob off the illustrations on some artist. He either did most of them himself or closely supervised them. Even though he is a great mathematician he knows that the illustrations are also important to his goal and keeps control of them. If he had said: "I don't do illustrations", the book would have been far inferior. In the same way, the mathematicians at WRI have to keep control of the documentation. David Park djmp at earthlink.net http://home.earthlink.net/~djmp/ From: danl at wolfram.com [mailto:danl at wolfram.com] To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net > > Your Mathematica purports to do more than that. It claims to be able to > compute whatever integral is available in any table of integrals. Do you > want me to give an exact quotation? I do not write the documentation.