Every now and then someone will post here on Mapleprimes and the code will use an older package such as linalg or stats. Quite often it is clear that the poster is new to Maple. Yet these packages have been superceded with new ones, eg. LinearAlgebra and Statistics.

One obvious question that then arises is: how did this user decide to use the older package?

GMP is now deeply integrated into Maple - which I consider to be a good thing.  But it appears that compiler writers are doing a bad job (see the first paragraph on GMP's home page)  In other words, unless you carefully make sure that you have compile GMP properly, it is entirely possible that you end up with a buggy library.  Very scary stuff.

In a previous comment, J. Tarr asks "what is Maple primarily intended to do?", and suggests that I might have something to say on the topic.

Because of John's answer to my last comment about a Maple wiki, I have searched first for antecedents in Maple Primes. From the many posts found in this search, I put together here what I consider the main points stated so far.

Oficial plans + technology:

http://www.mapleprimes.com/forum/how_do_we_grow_this_site

The New York Times has a really interesting article ``They criticized Vista.  And they should know.'' (you might need to register to see the article, I am not sure).  It shows why Vista isn't really an upgrade to XP, mostly through emails between senior Microsoft executives.  Basically, they knew it was a dud, and instead of going with the more honest approach they were at first planning, went with really misleading advertizing that made things much worse.