Some of you mentioned that you'd like a way to share notebooks, at least with other Mathematica users, and that the Demonstrations Project is obviously not the correct place. Doesn't the Wolfram Library Archive accept all sorts of documents? Or is that site really so dead by now that you wouldn't expect any readers if you upload there (and share links elsewhere)?

@David J M Park Jr, I'll happily be corrected on this, but I believe package loading and any kind of file import/export are still features of Player Pro only.

I have several questions about the current state of creating and reading CDF files.

Can they use private (third party) style sheets, and packages? Many advance research papers might use private routines in packages. Could one write a document that looks like a technical paper that uses such style sheets and packages?

I'm thinking of a method where there would be something like a UserBaseDirectory for the CDF player. Then you send a zip file to a colleague or someone who was interested in the 'paper' that contained the application with package(s) and style sheets. He could just unzip it into his CDF UserBaseDirectory location and read the paper.

In Mathematica 9 it was possible to install packages and style sheets in the Wolfram CDF files, where they had Applications and style sheets, and it appeared to me to work. But WRI choked that path off.

Owning Mathematica, or at least professional Mathematica, or Premier service should be enough to produce such documents.

It should be almost as easy to produce a CDF document from a Mathematica notebook as it is to produce a PDF document.

My view is that CDF is not yet good enough, but maybe getting close. Have there been any significant improvements toward this goal since Mathematica 10.0 first came out?

I have been teaching math for the past 30 years and have used Mathematica for about the last 15. It's an amazing tool, but I have to report that after all this time, I still have TONS of problems making my materials available to a wider audience. My peers who write documents in "Word", all share their tests and notes and other documents, sharing the work. The documents are all 'dead'. but since everyone is using the same application, it's easy to collaborate. When I try to share some of my notebooks with colleagues, they are all "amazed" at what Mathematica can do but A) are not willing to change their approach and B) often find that they can't even install the CDF player to view the files because of security issues at their place of employment.

Currently, I am employed as academic support (aka , math and science tutor) at a technical school. I have hundreds of Mathematica documents that I could use to help with explaining ideas, but again, I find there is no easy way, well, in fact no way, for me to share these documents with students. I can't install any software on the schools computers, and students are all using phones and tablets so no go there.

I have always appreciated David's perspective on writing and using Mathematica as a communication tool. My question at this point is, what should I do with the hundreds of "teaching" notebooks I have? I totally agree that the demonstrations site is not the place for these. It's a great resource, but I have always wondered why there isn't some place where users could post lessons, get feedback, and make them available. Like the "Wolfram Lessons Site".

Anyway... thanks for listening... I don't suspect this has any kind of reasonable solution at the current time.

I continue to struggle with the writing of Notebooks that are "literate". I think Knuth had a great idea when he proposed "Literate Programming" but it got side-tracked, in my opinion, with the macro-expansion implementation.

My main problem is that Mathematica best practices seem to dictate use of functional programming - and, in general, I like this idea very much. The resulting problem is that the best way to develop functional programming solutions seems to be to design and implement things bottom-up and inside-out. (I've seen Wolfram personnel do this in Webcasts and I've had a conversation with a Support staffer about this very point.)

While the resulting code is compact, and - assuming it fits in main memory - very fast, it is also (to me) very difficult to understand later. Notions such as abstraction, information hiding, and the lot, don't seem to have a place in this paradigm.

For example, arguments critical to understanding what a function does can be "far" away from the invocation of the function making it hard to "grok" things conceptually.

So, I write prose to try to describe how whatever I wrote works, and, often, why I did it the way I did. I do this so I can come back later and understand what I did.

To me, "Literate Programming" is about capturing much of the thought process that went into the development of the code.

If I were a better mathematician I might be able to make my solutions "read" more like math, but I've been unable to do this.