On Jul 13, 12:54 am, mhampton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I can assure you that many mathematicians use mathematica in thier > research; I used to.
That was my impression too, although I am not a mathmatician. I have worked with people who have used Mathematica for serious maths research. Like I've met people using MATLAB for serious engineering research. > But one of the many appeals of Sage is that the > source is open/checkable - I have had referrees mention that as > desirable on some of my previous mathematica-based papers. Although having the source available and being able to realistically use the source to check the code are two quite different things. The fraction of people can 1) Be bothered to try to check Sage by looking at the source code. 2) Have the knowledge to check Sage by reference to the source code must be quite small. Of course, the option is nice, but in practice how many can use it might be a very small number. > In my opinion the gap between Sage and mathematica is narrowing at an > impressive pace. Good to hear. > For my research purposes Sage is already clearly > superior; of course I only use a very small fraction of either > system. For teaching/demonstrations/computer labs Mathematica still > has the edge for most purposes, but the pros and cons are not easy to > add up in a one-dimensional way. > > Actually I think it will be much harder to catch up with Matlab in the > areas where it is strong, but I still like our odds in the long run. > Most likely Sage will only win over some subset of users with > particular needs, but that would be a healthier software ecosystem. I must admit, MATLAB seems to have clear advantages over Mathematica for data processing in engineering applications. > Consider as a parting thought that Sage has only existed for 1/10 of > the time of those systems. A bit more than a 10th it must be said - Mathematica has been around 20 years, Sage more than 3. On problem I see is that any new algorithms developed by users of Sage, can be copied quite easily into Mathematica. I'm not suggesting Wolfram would lift code, but good algorithms can be turned into Mathematica code quite easily. In contrast, anything developed inside Wolfram will not easily propagate to Sage. > M. Hampton Thank you for your comments. Dave --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
