On 12/6/06, William Stein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > ------- Forwarded message ------- > From: "Jaap Spies" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: "David Joyner" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, "William Stein" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Cc: > Subject: Re: [sage-devel] Re: Sage (fwd) > Date: Wed, 06 Dec 2006 15:39:24 -0800 > > David Joyner wrote: > > > just an amusing illustration of the frustrations we want to try to avoid. > > I really believe that because of the talented and inventive > > programmers working on SAGE, we can actually do better than both. > > > > I really hope so! I prefer Maple above Mathematica, but they are both > a pain ...
When I was messing around with Mathematica (couldn't get my hands on Maple, but I probably would have had a similar experience) back in high school, I found it *very* counterintuitive to do basic calculus. I essentially gave up trying. And given the amount of confusion about how Mathematica works displayed so far on this thread, my guess is that I am not alone. Part of the problem is the difference between mathematical functions and computer language functions. The idea of substituting parameters is present in mathematics... if I define f(x) = x sin (x^2) mathematically, and I want to evaluate it at some point in the domain, I just *do* the substitution. I don't typically write something separately. I'm afraid that this subtlety will likely be lost on most SAGE users. Extensive knowledge of computer programming is not required in order to use SAGE. I hope we can come up with a solution that is acceptable in both paradigms. Perhaps the solution that Math/Maple/etc. use is the best, but I hope we can find a more intuitive one. -- Bobby Moretti [EMAIL PROTECTED] --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
