So you have used Maple as a glorified calculator (Maple 101), then wrote a few 1 liners (Maple 201), and even a few larger procedures (Maple 301), where you were both amazed and horrified by 'op'. But when you get serious about programming in Maple, even for not-so-large procedures, what are the fundamental parts of the system that you should know? Other pages in this book talk about particular features. This one is instead a simple list of those Maple commands and concepts you need to know to be able to call yourself a Master Maple Programmer.

The left hand navigation bar calls it High Performance Maple Programming Techniques but the book itself is (now) called Tools of the Maple Masters.

It took me forever to find which tags were allowed. Why? because, silly me, I searched for it. And there is no page that has that information on it. Or, to be more precise, pretty much every page has that information in it, in the JavaScript region at the bottom of the input box. It is also interesting to note that the tags listed there do not include 'blockquote', and yet the toolbar does.

In my latest blog post, I used both the cite tag and the blockquote tag, to see if they did anything different. They do not. Worse, neither does what they are supposed to do, which is to indent what I post, so that it stands out. Why? Another issue seems to be that, according to the W3C, you can't have raw text in a blockquote, you are suppose to have enclosing tags (like 'p' for example), otherwise what you get isn't valid. So why does the button generate known invalid html? It's one thing for Microsoft to flaunt standards, but...

I am going to post this rant here on my primes blog instead of polluting some other post (like a book entry say) with all sorts of tangential opinionated stuff. The book entries should, over time, become canonical. The most useful stuff might even make it back (with proper attributions!) into product documentation. Right, so what's this rant about? Efficiency. I know all about that, you think to yourself. So this guys' going to go off and rant about how Maple is slow, show some examples that make his point, and so on. Bzzt, wrong. Ok, so Maple isn't the fastest thing ever, but it is generally fast enough. And when it isn't fast enough in some area where it is clearly behind, wait a couple of years (ok, sometimes 5, but I am patient), and voila, it's fixed. And the same holds for memory usage (though there one has to be even more patient). OK, so if it's not the product efficiency that he wants to rant about, what is it? People efficiency. Yes, I mean my time. The time it takes me to get my job done. I do a fair amount of work in Maple. In fact, I spend hours and hours using Maple, and minutes and minutes (when it's not fractions of seconds) doing computations. So when my tools slow me down, that makes a real difference to me. Like others, this is why I am interested in better development tools for Maple. And why many of us get upset when some features like copy and paste don't work quite right. This is the fundamental reason why some of the misnamed ``usability'' features irk me so. Let's take a look at what Wikipedia has to say about usability:

Usability is a term used to denote the ease with which people can employ a particular tool or other human-made object in order to achieve a particular goal.