{"id":2884,"date":"2011-01-13T13:39:31","date_gmt":"2011-01-13T12:39:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?p=2884"},"modified":"2011-02-16T13:14:18","modified_gmt":"2011-02-16T12:14:18","slug":"mathcad-prime-1-0-released-to-mixed-reception","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/?p=2884","title":{"rendered":"MathCAD Prime 1.0 released to mixed reception"},"content":{"rendered":"

A man I have a lot of time for is Joel Spolsky, author, software developer and previously a program manager for Microsoft Excel.\u00a0 Way back in the year 2000 he wrote an article called Things You Should Never Do, Part 1<\/a> where his main point was “The single worst strategic mistake<\/strong> that any software company can make is to rewrite your code from scratch.”\u00a0 He exemplified this principle using products such as Quattro Pro and Netscape 6.0.<\/p>\n

Not everyone agrees with Joel’s thesis and it seems that the managers at PTC, the owners of Mathcad, are among them.\u00a0 The last major update of Mathcad was version 14.0 which was released back in 2007 (the recent Mathcad 15.0 was a relatively minor update despite the .0 version number).\u00a0 To\u00a0 some outsiders it appeared that PTC were doing very little with the product until it transpired that what they were actually doing was an almost complete rewrite from the ground up<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That rewrite has now been released in the form of Mathcad Prime 1.0<\/a>.\u00a0 I don’t have my hands on a copy yet so I have been scouring the web to try and determine exactly what this new version does right and what it does wrong.\u00a0 Here’s what I’ve found so far.<\/p>\n