On Sun, Apr 20, 2008 at 12:07 PM, TimDaly <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > > A good unifying graphical interface is extremely important to creating > > > something that is a viable alternative to > > > Maple/Mathematica/Magma/Matlab. In some sense it is perhaps it > > > is *the* most important thing. > > I fully agree that a unifying graphical interface is extremely > important.
Cool. > But I find that Sage is again not thinking "long term". Quite true. > Another lesson from history.... Axiom has a help system that was > wildly innovative at the time it was created. Hyperdoc did things > like "back buttons", "tear-off pages" (aka open a new window), > "live embedded graphics" (click on an image and get a graph you > can actively manipulate), "client-server interaction" (AJAX), > "network based" (e.g browser/server model). > > It WAS wildly innovative at the time but "just barely" matches > what you can do in today's browser for the clever ideas it did > forsee. However, its "age is showing" and Axiom is moving to a > Firefox-based front end, similar in concept to the Sage notebook. Good. I remember reading about a Google Summer of Code project to implement something like that for Axiom from 2005, I think. That project failed; maybe the software environment offered by lisp/axiom didn't provide enough basic building blocks to complete the project in a few months. (However, projects can fail for numerous reasons, and I do *not* know the real reason.) > What causes me pause about the Sage notebook is that it is not > very innovative. True. It's completely straightforward and obvious. That's exactly why I like it. > Throw yourself into the future 30 years from now. > You have infinite CPU, memory, disk, and bandwidth. No they won't. > What will the researcher use all of this power for? > And what interface will they > use to structure their work? And what concepts will be "painfully > obvious" that everyone "should have"? I don't know. 30 years from now I'll hopefully be hanging out with my wife in the mountains of Alaska or something... Really, my involvement in mathematics software has nothing to do with trying to change the future of computational mathematics in the sense you have. I care much more about having tools *now* so that I can do the research I want to do, teach classes in the way I want to, and write the books and articles that I want to write. I couldn't do that with the tools available 4 years ago, hence Sage. The whole point of Sage is to solve today's problems today. > Axiom is working on a user interface based around a simple idea > called "the crystal". Think of your "problem" as a graph hanging > in space that gets continually updated with information from the > "river of the internet". Wrap a crystal with many facets around > that graph. Each facet of the crystal shows a different (but > consistent) view of the current state of the problem. Each facet > can be a face of many recursive sub-crystals covering smaller > parts of the problem. The crystals maintain the "intensional > stance" (what the user appears to be trying to do) of the user > and the graph is actively updated dynamically in anticipation > of potential requests. Thus, mentioning "L-functions" will kick > off a dynamics search and classification of all known work from > the "internet river" into the graph. Oh, yeah, and clicking for > "help" on a function brings up a LITERATE version of the function > documentation so you can learn how it really works in readable > form along with clickable bibliographic references to yet-other > literate algorithms. > > It is not an issue that this cannot be done efficiently with > today's hardware. The issue is that it is a conceptual structure > that allows a consistent growth path. In the language of design > (e.g. Winograd's books) it has new tacits and new affordances > with less breakage. I'd encourage you to read Winograd or other > "design philosophy" books and think about the design of the user > interface further. Norman's design books are especially entertaining: > <http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/dp/ > 0385267746> > Ask the questions: What does a computational mathematician need? > How can we structure the science platform so those needs are > fulfilled? What conceptual structures underlie that solution? If that turns out to be a good idea, probably my student's (or their students) will implement it in Maple, Mathematica, Matlab, Magma, and Sage. I hope they do. Go for it! (Regarding any idea you have.) Come up with a cool prototype for people to try out. If it is actually really useful and improves the quality of mathematical research, then unless you patent it to death, it'll likely show up in Sage and the Ma's too. Sage is not meant to be tomorrow's research system; it's *today's* free open source alternative to the big commercial mathematical software. That's it. Sage doesn't come from the computer algebra research community; it's not aimed at that community; and it's mostly not being written by that community. I really don't see a problem with that. Do you? > The 4Ms cannot make this kind of leap. The corporate structure won't > allow anything so innovative to set direction. In fact, I doubt you > could get Google, despite its corporate cleverness, to even consider > funding the development of such an interface, despite the fact that > they ARE "the river of the internet". At best, you get funded for > yet-another-notebook. Sigh. I am *very* grateful to Google for their volunteer funding of open source during the last several years! > You can continue to copy the 4Ms or by defining the new tacits and > affordances you can make the 4Ms irrelevant. To paraphrase Sun Tzu, > "A great general wins wars by not fighting them" > > Think long term. Look toward the 30 year horizon. Ask anybody who knows me. I'm way too impatient for that sort of thinking. That's just my personality. I think there is a place for both kinds of thinking, and I'm not telling you to think like me (though you tell me to think like you). In fact, I strongly encourage (and encouraged you above) to continue thinking about the 30 year horizon, etc. -- William --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
