On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 12:35 PM, Jason Merrill <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Brian Hayes writes a regular column for American Scientist called > Computing Science. In his latest article, "Calculemus!" > http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/2008/5/calculemus/1, Hayes > suggests that widely available tools for doing simple calculations and > mathematical experiments have not kept up with progress in software > technology. > > On the last page of the article, he mentions Python and Sage as a > possible way forward. He is somewhat critical, "The principal > developers are putting most of their energy into creating a research > tool for advanced mathematics, which can leave the skittish beginner > without a safe point of entry," but thinks the notebook interface "is > surely the way of the future." > > The whole article is an interesting read.
Here's what he says: " A project called Sage claims as its mission, "Creating a viable free open source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica and Matlab." Sage was initiated by William Stein of the University of Washington, and it now has hundreds of contributors. Sage is certainly not the self-contained, cohesive package that I argue for; on the contrary, it's a loose confederation of dozens of more specialized programs, such as GAP for group theory and R for statistics. All of the pieces are stitched together with Python code, which is also supposed to provide a consistent user interface. It works better than I would have guessed, but it's hardly seamless. The principal developers are putting most of their energy into creating a research tool for advanced mathematics, which can leave the skittish beginner without a safe point of entry." I think he based that mostly on an hour long conversation that he had with me and Tom Boothby at the AMS meeting in San Diego last January. I very strongly disagree with his conclusions about what Sage is, to put it mildly. -- William --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
