Timeline for Installation of third party package: is it on-topic?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
9 events
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| Apr 13, 2017 at 12:56 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
replaced http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/ with https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/
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| Apr 12, 2016 at 7:35 | history | tweeted | twitter.com/StackMma/status/719790950298624000 | ||
| Mar 13, 2016 at 21:11 | comment | added | Oleksandr R. | In all likelihood there are a fair number of people in the Mathematica community who would want to use any built-in feature, otherwise presumably WRI wouldn't have bothered to implement it. For third-party packages, especially commercial ones, I think this is not such a good assumption. Also, WRI does offer their own documentation and support to which we can refer to answer the question in the absence of anything else, but many packages are defunct and poorly documented, and maybe not even available to the majority of users. It is a difficult situation. | |
| Mar 13, 2016 at 21:05 | comment | added | Szabolcs |
@OleksandrR. "that would require us to make some sort of guarantee about our familiarity with arbitrary packages that maybe nobody here has ever used" <- Couldn't that argument be brought for just about any Mathematica feature? E.g. there's only one hit when searching for ToContinuousTimeModel, a function that exists since version 8. Also, there are several packages which are popular enough that question get answered. There are lots of hits for SciDraw/LevelScheme. It would be hard to come up with an objective criterion for which package is okay to ask about and which isn't.
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| Mar 13, 2016 at 20:31 | comment | added | Oleksandr R. | I think it cannot really be strictly on-topic because that would require us to make some sort of guarantee about our familiarity with arbitrary packages that maybe nobody here has ever used. That being said, I can see the merit of your position, and don't disagree strongly enough to vote it down. I can't help feeling that it is not a great situation to encourage potentially unanswerable questions, but it probably will do no lasting harm to the site even in the worst case, so a potential benefit to the community seems to at least justify the experiment. | |
| Mar 13, 2016 at 16:32 | comment | added | Szabolcs | I posted in favour of allow them! I'll leave the opposite argument to someone else. | |
| Mar 13, 2016 at 16:31 | history | edited | Szabolcs | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 105 characters in body
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| Mar 13, 2016 at 16:31 | answer | added | Szabolcs | timeline score: 24 | |
| Mar 13, 2016 at 16:09 | history | asked | Szabolcs | CC BY-SA 3.0 |