On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 4:56 PM, Robert Dodier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Hello, > > I was invited to the on-going Sage developer days workshop. > http://sagemath.org http://wiki.sagemath.org/dev1 > I gave a little presentation about Maxima. > http://maxima.sourceforge.net/misc/maxima-opinions.pdf > > Sage is a really exciting project in many ways. I think merging > different computational systems is a very useful goal. In Maxima > there is a similar trend although less extensive since at present > it is required that stuff be translated to Lisp. The new > computational stuff for exact linear algebra, modular forms, and > other topics is very interesting and a great contribution. > Maybe in some form some of that would someday be ported > to Maxima. > > I'm somewhat less excited by the subproject to write new > symbolic manipulation code for Sage. Sorry to say it, but it seems > like a reinvention of the wheel. Maybe that's unavoidable; > and maybe you'll do a better job of it than Maxima! > > Sage is a great project and it was terrific to meet William Stein > and everyone else. Many thanks to William for the invitation. > I look forward to further collaboration.
I am glad you liked it, it was also very terrific for me to meet William, Michael and all the other Sage developers for the first time in Bristol and then in Austin. I like your 4th slide (A laissez-faire attitude), that's how I view mathematics and I think it's how most physcists access mathematics. As to symbolics, I can answer that one easily. New code gets written when the current projects don't satisfy the needs of those writing the new code. I know you once written to the SymPy mailinglist asking us to rather join (or use) Maxima [1], instead of reinventing the wheel. Well, Sage does exactly what you wanted, i.e. using maxima from Python, instead of reinventing the wheel. But lisp is just too difficult for me (and all other people I personally know) to fix. The other reason is that I think lisp is dead. Compare this: http://maxima.cvs.sourceforge.net/maxima/maxima/src/limit.lisp?revision=1.53&view=markup to this: http://hg.sympy.org/sympy/file/ccebd03423df/sympy/series/gruntz.py it has more or less the same functionality now. Which is more readable? I guess there are people who will find the lisp version more readable, but I and most people I know find the python version more readable/maintainable. However, on a positive note, I think this game is not a game with a sum of 1, but rather it seems to me that all Sage, Maxima, SymPy and other packages are getting new users and developers. In the end, all I want is to get the job done and I think it's important to make sure all the packages talk to each other well, and also to try to find common grounds of cooperation, if possible. Ondrej [1] http://groups.google.com/group/sympy/browse_thread/thread/8a761b6a710e5319/a620d45d9048a0fb --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
