On Sat, Sep 13, 2008 at 4:01 AM, David Joyner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I agree with everything Jason said. It would be useful if you could > find one of the > lead developers who would be willing to review your code, once written, and > you could ask them about how to implement ideas. Bobby Moretti used to be > great for that but I don't know if he is still doing Sage stuff.
Bobby is no longer doing Sage stuff. > I guess Gary Furnish > (I'm going from memory, sorry if I mis-spelled you name) might be taking over > Bobby's job but I'm not sure. I think both Bobby and Gary were undergrads and > might have moved on. Gary is not taking over Bobby's job. > There are several others who could review your code > you could ask but many, like Jason, tend to be very busy. Yes. Many of us are trying to keep up with fixing bugs in Sage, addressing major performance issues in Sage, and pushing the effort to port Sage to Windows/Solaris/OSX64-bit, etc. > The "official" way I guess is to write a "SEP" (Sage enhancement proposal) > http://wiki.sagemath.org/SAGE_Enhancement_Proposals > It seems maybe some of what you want is under > http://wiki.sagemath.org/CalculusSEP > so there is no need to worry about design since the calculus SEP was approved. That SEP was approved two years ago, implemented, and subsequently found to be seriously lacking in some ways. That's part of the point Jason Merrill is making, I think. > If you do that, you might want to include hypothetical > code snippets of the form: "Here's what Sage does now ... and here's > the behaviour I intend to implement ..." These are *very* useful. > In any case, you want to email (maybe offlist) various people to see if they > would be willing to referee your code when it is written. One scenario > (if Bobby and > Gary are out of touch): Jason and I could act as initial referees and > someone like > Mike Hansen or ... could give final approval? (I don't want to speak for Jason > of Mike, this is just a possible scenario.) > > Good luck. Anything that improves consistency and usability is a good thing > I think! The symbolic calculus code is currently being rewritten by myself and Burcin Erocal at a lower level to be much faster. See http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/3872 I handed this off to Burcin nearly three weeks ago, and he did a lot of polish, but as far as I know hasn't posted any code. What's up Burcin!? I was optimistically hoping this would be done and in Sage by now. Could you at least post your code? Jason, one thing to be honest is that when you suggest sweeping changes that are too big for one person to do, this seriously scares people. We've had many people over the last few years do just that, and it almost never ends well. Sometimes it does, when things are well organized. One example was moving lots of arithmetic to use NTL as a backend, which I think Joel Mohler and Craig Citro really organized -- they did a superb job. Sweeping changes to the interface, as you were suggesting, can be particularly scary because they can introduce backwards incompatibilities and break other code. A person's best bet to really get involved with Sage development is to go to a Sage Days workshop. We have them on a regular basis. William > > > On Fri, Sep 12, 2008 at 7:46 PM, Jason Merrill <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> >> I have some ideas and questions I'd like to share about how to make a >> nice interface for derivatives of objects with several variables and/ >> or dimensions. Right now, Sage has diff for partial derivatives, and >> gradient for gradients, but I think there's room for extending Sage's >> capabilities. >> >> I'm hesitant to spend a chunk of time writing these ideas down, >> though, because my last two efforts[1,2] didn't earn much interest. >> Am I doing it wrong? Is this just not a great time in the project's >> life cycle for this kind of discussion? I'd like to contribute to >> making Sage a joy for me and people like me to use, but some of my >> ideas are too big for me to unilaterally implement as a newcomer to >> the project without others' input. Reply off list if it seems more >> appropriate, though others might benefit from hearing how to most >> usefully share ideas. >> >> [1] >> Symbolic/Numeric interface thoughts: >> http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel/browse_thread/thread/dd03e6efb0b991d3/19c2c432ab056aea?lnk=gst&q=jwmerrill#19c2c432ab056aea >> >> [2] >> syntax could be more consistent: >> http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel/browse_thread/thread/953447e501ec30d3/95291cca41657015?lnk=gst&q=syntax+consistent#95291cca41657015 >> >> Regards, >> >> JM >> > >> > > > > -- 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
