On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 9:48 PM, William Stein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > 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.
Indeed. It was fun for me to read. He first states what he wants, e.g.: " It should be self-contained, easily installed (and uninstalled), well-documented, internally consistent, bug-free and foolproof. " and other things, like: " I want a system that's mathematically well-behaved. I should not have to live in a world where the integers end at 4,294,967,295 or where 1/3×3 is equal to something other than 1. Give me unlimited precision and exact arithmetic, at least for rational numbers. " and I said to myself -- hey, that's exactly Sage. And then on the next page he says Sage isn't the thing. :) So I don't know what he wants. Ondrej --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
