flip a coin
Saddened by the loss of mathworld. I once attempted to
mirror it, but eric's atitude was that it was his "property"
(never mind that all the material was discovered by others)
and that even people acting in the public interest ought not
to propagate his writings, so he outright banned any IPs
which crawled
more than a particular portion of the site.
I've noticed this thread quite a bit recently: academic
people are often as reluctant as corporate people to hand
over their work to the public without putting strings on it.
Such strings run the gamut from "non-commercial use only" to
outright denial of useful work. I've tried arguing the point
with a few groups making valuable mathematical software, and
have been astonished to hear the argument "why should
someone else benefit from my work?"
Why on earth is someone in research, in a publicly
funded institution of learning, if they do not
expect others to benefit from their work? Are they just
there to show off, live the life of a poor researcher, grind
theoretical axes with their colleagues? It seems a bit silly
given the amount of public information is required to get a
good education in the first place.
Oh well. We definitely need to replace mathworld; I fear the
UberWikis of the
world may not adequately support editing mathematical
notation inline, and
that some sort of blend of HTML renderings and LaTeX source
might be in order.
Recent positive impressions of Hevea
spring to mind. I somehow doubt that MathML
will be able to revive itself. Integrating mathematical
semantics and mathematical typesetting seems to me like a
fool's errand, as people will always be discovering new
branches of mathematics, writing software to explore them,
and inventing notations to describe them. I would be
perfectly happy to visit a page
containing a very good Hevea rendering of some explanatory
LaTeX,
a link to some PARI
or Maxima
code implementing the concept, and perhaps a "fetch
LaTeX/DVI" button.
wen: to dodge the XML issue entirely and
focus on the issue of pseudocode, all I can say is that
programming language semantics are a lot more complex than
you give them credit for. It is not at all trivial to
translate "any" language to "any" other, despite our ability
to prove the existence of such translations. A translation
will range from a simple statement-for-statement rewrite to
an unrecognizable mass of supporting code necessary to
preserve meaning. In any event, the idiomatic clarity of
code written by a human (which is only moderate at
the best of times) is likely to vanish, rendering the main
purposes of a high level language (communication and
maintainability) moot.