On Sun, Apr 20, 2008 at 2:13 PM, TimDaly <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > I'm surprised by how convinced you are that using a specific > > technology/language -- literate programming -- can be a silver > > bullet to solve such a difficult problem. I think peer review, > > and many many other things, are steps in the right direction, > > but *not* solutions to the problem. I think it's just a difficult > > problem, with no easy solutions. > > Actually, I don't think that literate programming is a silver bullet. > But I do think that it exposes the real work that is needed to make > something like Sage live (see my power-of-3 screed a while back).
OK, I'm glad to hear that you do *not* think literate programming is a silver bullet, since I was really getting that impression from you. > If Gary is going to figure out "the way up the mountain face" > wouldn't it make sense to write it down so others can read it? Of course. > Or is it better to let the next person figure it out (badly) from > reading the code and inferring the path? Of course not. > Mathematical equations are "icons". You read a paper or book which > explains all the meaning of the terms and then summarize it all in > an iconic equation "E=MC^2". A book on mathematics would be rather > worthless if you just collected up all the equations, sorted them > by some random metric into collections of files, and then passed > them on to the next person. That is, however, what we do with the > code now. Computer code is *not* equivalent to equations. At least Python code isn't. Any computer language (or code in a language) where code is equivalent to only the equations in a book is a terrible language to chose as the main implementation language for a large mathematical software system. I actually really like code because it is so precise. One can use debugging techniques (especially on interpreted code) to find out more about what code is really doing. Comments, English paragraphs, papers, etc., tend to be ambiguous and sometimes just wrong. -- William Stein Associate Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
