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Comment by sterlind | Hacker News Reader

ran into this myself just today, but with Symbolics.jl instead of SymPy. I just needed an algebra scratchpad, and Symbolics was.. barren. and uninviting. I thought of reaching for Mathematica but resorted to pencil and paper, like a barbarian.

same deal with solvers more generally. the coin-or stuff (e.g. Cbc) is slow and buggy, Cplex and Gurobi are far better but very expensive. where are the PhDs in this field? what are they building?

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>I just needed an algebra scratchpad, and Symbolics was.. barren. and uninviting. I thought of reaching for Mathematica but resorted to pencil and paper, like a barbarian.

Have you tried Maxima? It seems more ergonomic.

I use Maxima on a Atom N270 netbook. It works greatly, fast and usable. Gnuplot for plotting, and I'm done.

Sympy is good as a scratchpad I think. For my case I needed minimal state space realisations of MIMO transfer matrices. In mathematica this is just two functions. Implementing this in Python could take months

> I thought of reaching for Mathematica but resorted to pencil and paper, like a barbarian.

A very computer-science perspective with the obligatory dose of hubris.

Pencil and paper is continuing to serve a much older, much more consolidated discipline (mathematics) well for... ever since paper was invented.

the barbarian bit was tongue-in-cheek. it's just that symbolic algebra is one of those old-school, classic use cases for computers, like playing chess or guiding missiles or scheduling routes. I enjoy those kinds of moments.

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