What are the real strengths and weaknesses of Maple?

[thharrimw]

I am thinking about maple soon and i have watched aall the movies at http://www.maplesoft.com/Products/Maple/demo/aca.aspx but at that website they are trying to sell maple so i just wanted to get a review of maple from people who have used it. also could anyone tell me any other features (good or bad) that maple has.

 

[Dr.D]

It is a very powerful and useful piece of software. The documentation is worthless in my view. I can do a lot of things with it after almost three years, and I'm still stumbling around on other things that ought to be clear by now if the documentation were written with a user in mind. (I'm convinced that the documentation is written to please the Maple folks themselves, with no view to the needs of a user at all.) That said, it is still a great piece of software and I use it almost daily.

 

[thharrimw]

Can you do work with piecewise equations on maple?

 

[Dr.D]

I have written piecewise functions, so I would assume you can work with piecewise equations. I have not tried this.

Just recently I wrote a function defined piecewise over five intervals, and then proceeded to differentiate it multiple times with no difficulties at all. Actually, I started with a single function. My composite function was zero is the first interval, the single function translated into the second interval, set a nonzero constant in the third interval, used my original function translated and mirrored for the fourth interval, and zero in the fifth interval.

It took a while to figure out how to do it, but once I tried a test case or two, then I saw how things worked and it was easy to set up the main problem. One of the very nice things about it all is that if you want to try something, just try it. If it does not work, you can wipe those lines out and try something else.