On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 8:06 PM, Dan Drake <dr...@kaist.edu> wrote: > On Sat, 10 Jan 2009 at 12:13PM -0500, Luiz Felipe Martins wrote: >> 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. > > Ironically, one thing that makes the time investment valuable is that > Sage costs nothing to acquire. In graduate school, I made an enormous > time investment into CAS X and became very proficient with it. Then I > came to my current institution, which uses CAS Y, and discovered that > all my time investment into X was worthless. > > (Actually, it's worse than that: here, they use use an outdated version > of Y and aren't interested in updating. So when I searched the web > trying to learn about Y, I kept running into unhelpful information about > the newest version, which made learning the older version even more > difficult.) > > With Sage, this issue is moot. Anywhere I go, I can use Sage. If I write > Sage code, any colleague can get Sage and run it. These things > contribute to making the time investment in learning Sage valuable, and > are things that the four M's don't have. >
It's the same problem with a lot of different programs one might chose to use, though math software is somehow particular bad for some reason, due to the high price for the non-student versions. It's always really amazed me that Maple academic is over $550 and non-academic is over $2000. Isn't that nearly an order of magnitude worse than non-student versions of Word/Photoshop/etc? One problem I personally had wasn't the same sort of forced transition from CAS X to CAS Y like you had, but that the sole "CAS" I could use was Magma, since it was literally the only program out there capable of doing pretty much any of the interesting computational mathematics I need for my teaching or research. Not only were all my eggs in one basket, so to speak, but buying a single license of Magma costs well over $1000, and that is *with* the academic discount. That situation was just very frustrating for me, not because I couldn't get Magma (I got it for free as a developer), but that so many other students and colleagues couldn't get it. Also, I think the technology in Magma overall is not up to snuff compared to what I saw as possible, and that situation is not changing. (I mean that Magma's capabilities in graphics, Cython-like compilation, user defined types, viewing of source code, etc., are poor.) There was just no rational choice but to switch. -- William --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
