Re: [fricas-devel] Re: Project website

On Thu, 6 Feb 2025, Tim Daly wrote:
> Arthur,
> I remember our conversations from the distant past. You did excellent work
> making Axiom quite portable based on your lisp and other modifications.

Thank you for the kind words! Way back then typical computers were a lot 
smaller and fitting in Axiom in on other than "jumbo" ones was "fun".

> Unfortunately I spent a lot of time with Bill Schelter and did work on AKCL
> including various Axiom optimizations so I essentially removed all that you
> did in order to work with what I knew. Sorry about that.

No need to apologise. As your various emails explain your objectives were 
veery specific and indeed ambitious.

> I am really sorry to hear that Albert Rich died. We corresponded quite a
> bit.
> I co-authored a rule-based system at IBM Research based on Forgy's RETE
> as the basis for the Expert System offering. Rich and I discussed improving
> the rule-based machinery in Axiom to include his work. He did amazing work.
>
He is remembered!!!!


>> hypothetical keen new generation could cut their teeth on would be good.
> The "chance" you describe is a fork. We've already seen how that evolves.

I think a form while a system is still alive is one thing. A fork when the 
system is otherwise dead still needs to take some care to retain credit 
for and memory of the earlier work, but it is much harder to say that it 
is doing active damage.

> The literate programming goal was to make it possible for someone to be
> able to maintain and modify Axiom without contact with the original
> developers.
> It was intended to "make Axiom live". The current sources build from the
> books (pamphlet format is just latex renamed). I collected a few 
> research papers and got permission to re-create them in one of the 
> books.

Indeed but it is then fairly extreme to insist that the "someone" wishes 
to make their modifications follow exactly the path that their 
predecessors would have in an ideal world.
Well my interest might not be in recreating all of Axiom but in mining it 
for ideas and components in a sense after the style where you collected 
research papers authored by others to incorporate. It is way too long ago 
that I looked inside Axiom but I suspect there is algorithmic content that 
may do better than some existing alternative systems, and from a 
practical person's perspective explositing those elsewhere would avoid 
the work being lost if Axiom is not there to host it. In many respects 
the type schemes and levels of abstraction that drove Axiom from early 
days also needs not to fade from memory if the system dies. If in working 
on that I ended up ready to adopt a more literate mode of work than I use 
at present it would have educated me!

> Unfortunately I only expanded certain algebra domains in literate form. 
> I did insert bibliographic
> references in the algebra sources when I could find the papers.

That surely is because you did not have a full 1000 years to work on it 
and not enough other like-minded folks chose to join in. With Reduce I 
find it really painful that the open source ideal that co-developers will 
flock to join in work on an interesting projecy can be a bit of an 
illusion!

>> A "30 year horizon" surely involves a project being reinvented and
>> reforged anew
>
> It is not possible to do deep research such as adding proofs using
> the Axiom/SPAD combination. The parser/compiler is too fragile
> for such deep surgery.
Fair do.
> So relative to my "research focus" fricas
> is an effort devoted to "polishing". Worse I've introduced dependent
> types which really complicates the inheritance logic well beyond what
> the current compiler can handle.
I already said that learning from what you are doing on types would be 
desirable.

> The SANE version of Axiom is wildly different from the github version.
> For example, the source is now all pure common lisp using CLOS.
> It is also restructured from the ground up to include a LEAN Proof
> inheritance
> tower parallel to the Category-Domain towers. (I spent many years as a
> visiting
> scholar at CMU working with the CS and Math/Philosophy related to LEAN)
>
> So you can see that for the last decade I've drifted quite far from the git
> repo.
> Worse, I've drifted from the SPAD world. Given that i was vilified for
> removing
> BOOT code I expect the non-existing Axiom community would not approve.
> Thus none of the code hit the repo.
>
So it is in effect a new project and if there is a non-existing Community 
then their approval is moot and 100% unimportant. But not seeing all your 
work preserved somewhere would feel criminal to me.

>> So having a reasonably definitive "here lies" archive with at least
>> workable build scripts and pointers to the easier tasks that a
>> hypothetical keen new generation could cut their teel on would be good.
>
> The last tombstone above the current Axiom work is in git.
> There is also a tombstone on Wikipedia
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom_(computer_algebra_system)
>
Yes but the git version ignores all your more recent work that is really 
pushing towards ideals. Your personal interest is not (as I understand 
you) in delivering a working practical "software product" but in exploring 
the more fundamental issues. It would be hard for anybody to pick that up 
or even understand it if what you have been doing over recent years just 
sits on your private machine to be eventuallyt lost forever.

BTW I think my views regarding Microsoft and github and 2-factor 
authentication may not be identical to yours but I am not terribly cheery 
about all such. So for some of what I do for myself I host a git 
repository on a Raspberry Pi (!) and a FEW selected people are given 
access. And I control everything.

Since I am now retired I do not need to satisfy anybody but myself with 
how I spend my time - and I get my kicks more out of supporting other 
users with bits of research (less deep and ambitious then yours) 
interleaved. But also cooking and eating and wildlife activities...

You say "code rot happens" and for any package unless there is some mut 
who is prepared to patch stuff up the rot can be disabling for a whole 
community. That is part of where I see myself fitting in!

       Arthur

> The git repo built and ran tests without errors when last I checked (a long
> time ago).
> It uses a known-good tar copy of Camm's Lisp which he has changed since
> then.
> The X11 replacement (Wayland) seems to be spreading rapidly but I don't
> know if
> Wayland will support Axiom's X11 code. Code rot happens.
>
> Most amusing is that Axiom runs on Windows :-)
>
> Tim
>