Hi. The software you mention may remain nameless, but it is pretty obvious what it is. There was a serious screw up when they tried to redo their whole interface in Java, as I was told by a representative.
There are two main reasons I switched to sage, besides frustration with other software: 1) A few years ago I decided math students should learn a real computer language, instead of the scripting language of some particular CAS. I started desining a Number Theory course using Python. So, Sage is a natural choice. The language of the software you mentioned is particularly inconsistent and badly designed. (I know, I once debugged one of their integration routines.) 2) The notebook interface and its online capabilities. Believe me, going to Sage has been (and will continue to be) a major time investment. Faculty coming to Sage will weigh their disillusion with other software against the investment needed to change. I actually pondered about it for the whole fall semester, before "taking the plunge". People will have to be convinced of two things: 1) It works better than current commercial software. 2) Even if the transition is not easy, it is worth the effort. Felipe On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 11:53 AM, john_perry_usm <john.pe...@usm.edu> wrote: > > One of the reasons I switched to Sage was that a handful of years ago > the previous CAS I used (who shall remain nameless) introduced a > worksheet interface that grossly slowed down the system. Rather than > improve the efficiency, subsequent releases made things worse by > adding an extremely slow syntax highlighting, "math display", and a > bunch of other eye candy that they clearly had not thought out. Typing > more than a few lines became a chore even on high-powered machines. > The first thing I used to do when installing updates was to switch > back to the "classic" interface. > > By contrast, my favorite text editor of all time is jEdit, whose > syntax highlighting works efficiently. > > If syntax highlighting of a sort is added to the Sage notebook, I hope > it's very, very fast--and even so, I hope there will be an option to > turn it off. > > john perry > > On Jan 10, 9:06 am, Jason Grout <jason-s...@creativetrax.com> wrote: >> William Stein wrote: >> > On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 2:30 AM, Martin Albrecht >> > <m...@informatik.uni-bremen.de> wrote: >> >>> Sure. I think that what you want is still orthogonal to the TinyMCE >> >>> effort, but having another edit widget in the tree "just" for >> >>> highlighting ought to be well thought out and the burden of >> >>> maintenance must be taken into account, i.e. if somehow TinyMCE could >> >>> be extended to do Python and all the other languages the notebook >> >>> supports syntax highlighting via some plugins that would be >> >>> preferable. As far as I understand we don't use TinyMCE to edit the >> >>> cells themselves yet, but that could be something we might do in the >> >>> future. >> >> One concern I'd have about this is that this added convenience could slow >> >> down >> >> the creation and work with the input cells. They're quite snappy now and I >> >> would like to keep them that way (rather them being bloated). >> >> >> Martin >> >> > I also share this concern, having done a lot of the work to make the >> > notebook snappy and not bloated. Last year, Tom Boothby did integrate >> > the EditArea code editor into the notebook, and we tried it >> > extensively, but it just plain "felt slow", so we didn't go forward >> > with including it in Sage at the time. >> >> > Tom likes to push the notebook quite hard, e.g., editing dozens of >> > very large cells in a single worksheet, so he's pretty sensitive to >> > the bloat versus speed issue. >> >> I have one very large cell in a notebook and it is very, very painful to >> type a single character in that cell currently. You can download the >> worksheet by getting the source .tar.gz >> athttp://arxiv.org/abs/0812.1616(direct >> link:http://arxiv.org/e-print/0812.1616v1) >> >> It's basically a large .sage file that we've copied into a single cell >> of the notebook. I'll see if I can try the editarea trick with it. >> >> Jason > > > -- "The main things which seem to me important on their own account, and not merely as means to other things, are knowledge, art, instinctive happiness, and relations of friendship or affection." -Bertrand Russell L. Felipe Martins Department of Mathematics Cleveland State University luizfelipe.mart...@gmail.com --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
