Re: [Axiom-developer] Catching up on internals

[Martin Baker]

On 02/11/17 21:10, Tim Daly wrote:
> Another thought... While people don't seem to like lisp as a platform
> it does have major advantages. I usually find myself using the lisp
> debugging facilities (trace, break, and REPL evaluation) to find
> out what failed and where.
>
> If you go from Spad to executable code you lose all of that.

Tim,

This is one of the problems, in my view, in that Lisp shows through 
underneath SPAD. That is debugging, error messages, outputs, etc. are 
often formatted as Lisp or require Lisp knowledge. I think this is 
particularly important for potential new users. SPAD has a steep enough 
learning curve on its own without needing to learn Lisp. Could it be 
things like this that prevent new user take up and explain the limited 
amount of discussion here?

What I would like would be a clean language for people interested in 
mathematics without all the baggage of having to learn lots of 
(non-mainstream) computer stuff that's not really about the mathematics.

Martin B