Hi Hazem, On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 3:28 AM, Hazem <hazem.biqa...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Forgot to add that we would need to include some kind of spreadsheet- > like capability, which is quite useful and convenient when one wants > to create/edit matrices and arrays.
Yes, there has been discussion about this on sage-devel, and maybe on sage-support. From memory, some folks have posted proof-of-concept stuff, but I may be wrong. I think David Joyner is one of the people who have worked on a spreadsheet-like capability. > Hazem > > On Mar 22, 11:23 pm, Hazem <hazem.biqa...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Thank you all for your feedback. >> >> I agree that maintaining anoher version of Sage is probably spreading >> current resources too thin. I was asking to see if this was indeed the >> case. On the other hand, an engineering and physics oriented Sage >> could help boost Sage and bring in more resources from a largely >> untapped and enthusiastic audience. We would be competing more >> directly with Mathematica in particular, and other packages (MATLAB, >> etc.) in general, and making alot of waves and getting more attention >> that way. >> >> We could start simply by packaging a version of Sage that is smaller >> and drops most of the parts that are not widely used by most applied >> scientists and engineers, and emphasizes other packages and >> capabilities found in MATLAB for example. Documentation would >> necessarily have to be written or adapted with applied scientists in >> mind, and an aggressive promotion campaign among users of commercial >> computation software would be necessary. >> >> This version of Sage would be based on the main version, but would be >> a subset of it for simplicity's sake, more or less, with some optional >> packages treated as standard. It would be important not to include >> packages that have overlapping functionality, but choose only one of >> them. The distribution must be kept relatively small both for size and >> to keep it less confusing to a newbie. More integration would come >> with time. Since the Windows port of Sage is currently underway and in its early stages, perhaps anyone who actually considers features and packages for physics/engineering/numerical stuff might consider working on those packages first in the Windows port. I'm saying this because the Windows port is rather small at the moment, something like 70MB at the moment with version 0.3.3. So while it's still small and manageable, one might be able to support engineering capabilities. Furthermore, because Windows is more familiar to many engineers (I may be wrong here), supporting engineering features in the Windows port is a good idea. For more info on the Windows port, please refer to this site: http://windows.sagemath.org/ >> One great "selling" feature would be Cython, which provides the >> possibility to achive high computation speeds coupled with a nice and >> clean programming language. This is a big consideration for engineers >> and applied scientists and it is noteworhy that Python already has a >> growing user base among them. With Scilab we can even offer a MATLAB- >> like language as an option or as part of a mixed environment. Symbolic >> capabilties can be handled by a subset of the packages already offered >> (or soon to be offered) by Sage. >> >> I know what you are going to say: "Hazem, whya don't you do it?" >> >> I would love to, but honestly my time does not permit, even if I knew >> how to do it. I will keep it i mind, though. >From my perspective, there are many things I want to implement at the moment and I have at least 3 hrs per day to work on Sage, but I don't have necessary resources. So in a sense, I sort of understand what you're saying here. As regards Scilab and Sage, I think that Ronan Paixão has worked on a Sage-Scilab interface. From my reading of the Scilab license, I think it can be legally problematic to include Scilab in Sage, but I'm not a lawyer. David Joyner knows more about software licenses than I do. >> We can advertise for volunteers to take over and run the project, at >> least. -- Regards Minh Van Nguyen --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
