On Apr 10, 2008, at 11:35 AM, mabshoff wrote:
> On Apr 10, 4:40 pm, "William Stein" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > <SNIP> >> We should make Sage as easy or easier to install than >> any of Mathematica, Maple, Matlab, or Magma. >> I see no reason to compromise on this at all, since the >> goal is to provide a viable alternative to Mathematica, >> Maple, Matlab, and Magma. Part of this is that Sage must be >> as easy to install as those programs. > > Sage *is* easy to install provided one is capable of reading and > following README.txt. All the points about computer literacy aside > [insert "when I was young I had to walk both ways to school uphill" > rant] I believe that this is a sad, sad world when somebody who is > attempting to get a college education is incapable of following a > simple README.txt. And I am not asking people to do anything hard > here, i.e. Robert's argument that people should learn mathematics > instead of CS skills does not reflect reality, but to follow an url, > download a 1MB binary and install it. > > Other people in IRC have pointed out that my expectations of the > average college student seem rather high and not grounded in reality, > so I have no intention of opposing the switch to zip files for the > vmware image. But it is my understanding the people at a University > are supposed to acquire the skills to solve problems, i.e. become > capable to approach a problem they have never solved and solve it by > thinking about it. I don't want to sound like an elitist jerk [too > late I guess], but if you are foiled by a 7zip archive maybe we have a > case of PEBKAC :) [look it up if you don't know what that is ;)] I don't think the issue is whether or not the prospective user is capable of following instructions. The real issue is the cost-benefit analysis for the prospective user. I think there are a lot of potential users who might have vaguely heard about Sage from a colleague/teacher/whoever, and get to sagemath.org, and have to figure out what to do next. For many of these people, we now have their eyeballs for about 15 seconds. If they can't figure out how to download and start using Sage with less neurons than it takes to get distracted by the newspaper or their cup of coffee or whatever, then we lose them. The thing is, they *don't care about Sage yet*, and if the coffee smells better, they'll go for the coffee. So for this reason I advocate we push this even further. We should try to absolutely minimise the number of clicks needed to get them running Sage on their own machine. Currently on sagemath.org, they have to do the following: (1) click on download, (2) click on Microsoft Windows Binary (note that many users may not even know what "binary" means), (3) figure out that they need to download the zip file, i.e. click on it (note that many users at this stage might never have seen an apache-served directory listing) I reckon it needs to be WAY simpler than this. It needs to be a single click from the main page, labelled "Download Sage for Microsoft Windows", which goes straight to a self-extracting installer. The contents of README.txt need to be put on the screen without even needing to click on README.txt. david --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
