I know you have vented your frustration in the past and it seems, like others, that you are not confident that PTC will bring Prime to a level that matches M15 (in the near future)
I am, like you, very concerned with the lack of development of Prime and worried that Mathcad will not work on future versions of Windows. Thank god PTC are releasing M15.040.
In all seriousness, what can we do except vent our frustration here?
Mark Buckton wrote:
As a very experienced Mathcad user I wanted to garner your thoughts on how the user forum could help the PTC Mathcad programming team?
There are a number of ways this could be achieved and I have asked Ryan about the possibility of setting up a group with experienced users and PTC staff - still waiting on a response. The group would merely aid with development of Prime and not be an opportunity to rip into the product. After all, this is the future of Mathcad and I am more than willing to help if PTC allow it.
I was going to suggest that maybe you and Werner could use Mathcad Prime 3 to come up with an answer but then I released that MC Prime 3 it is so buggy and slow that that approach would be futile (I calculated that it would give a result but take 10^10000000000 years of CPU time). Then I thought that maybe you could produce a possible solution by plotting the variables and then intuiting an answer but then I remembered that MC Prime plots are also broken. I think we all are in deep sh... what do you think?
A very concerned maintenance paying user.
The TC is controlled by PTC User, so I don't believe it's much of a way forward. It's not going to change from what it is now. It meets very rarely, they insist that one of the meetings is face to face, it has no virtual meeting room or private forum....
Back in the good old days of Mathsoft (sigh 
) there was a secret, invite only, group called the Power Users. The group had it's own forum on the Collaboratory that was invisible to mere mortal users. You would recognize many of the names: me, Tom, Stuart, Dixie, Philip, Robert. There were other names you probably wouldn't recognize because other than the Power Users group they rarely posted to the Collaboratory. The thing about the Power Users group is that there really was a lot of interaction between the users and the Mathsoft staff (including Allen Razdow himself). They didn't always do what we wanted (e.g. they implemented SUC, despite our warnings), but they did at least listen, and a lot of ideas were generated that did get into the product (e.g. affine units such as temperature).
Richard Jackson wrote:
The TC is controlled by PTC User, so I don't believe it's much of a way forward. It's not going to change from what it is now. It meets very rarely, they insist that one of the meetings is face to face, it has no virtual meeting room or private forum....
Back in the good old days of Mathsoft (sigh
That is exactly what I was suggesting, but of course, of would require interaction from certain members of the PTC team.
Mark Buckton wrote:
Hi Mike;
I have concerning details about PTC Mathcad software engineering department. Rumor has it that they visited the CERN LHC in Switzerland. They were at the facility to discuss candidate features for the upcoming versions of Mathcad Prime. Unfortunately one of them fiddled with some software settings on a remote terminal and a serious accident occurred at the facility. It would seem that all the PTC Mathcad software engineers were bombarded with superluminal Neutrinos. They are all OK thank god and back working at PTC. However they have been infected and are now working at speeds faster than the speed of light. PTC are monitoring the situation but the situation is serious because the Mathcad programmers are now working at such tremendous speed they appear to have ripped the very fabric of time and space. The consequence of which is that each version Mathcad Prime goes further back in time. Even though they know the problem exists they cannot allay the atomic affects on the human genome. It seems that Mathcad Prime 5 is now destined to have Mathcad 13 or below capability. Thankfully unlike the Ebola virus this cell degradation and time warp effect is not contagious and doesn't seem to have spread to their other programming teams. But there are some stories about that the CREO team may have been also exposed to high intensity Mathcad programing team as a result of software interoperability.
As long as it experiences some kind of spacetime discontinuity and skips over M12, resulting in an asymptotic approach to the start of M11.2, we might be OK. 
M11.2 with local function capability and couple of other tweaks would be pretty good - there were a few backdoor hacks into the M11 symbolic processor that proved quite useful and the dreaded static type checking didn't exist, which made life a lot easier for dealing with many classes of problem (getting rid of static type checking is the best thing I've seen in Prime).
As a very experienced Mathcad user I wanted to garner your thoughts on how the user forum could help the PTC Mathcad programming team?
It is traditional for Mathcad developers to ignore experienced users.
One glance at Prime was sufficient for me to suspect that there was no development strategy in place for implementing new capability (such as automatic paragraph/equation/figure numbering or improved string handling and data structure support (eg, multidimensional arrays)). The very page-oriented implementation also leads me to suspect that the original vision of an "engineering whiteboard" was completely abandoned - very surprising when the workplace is becoming more screen-oriented - and that too many "programmers" and not enough "users" are involved in requirement/design decisions.
Stuart
