On Mar 22, 2009, at 8:23 PM, Hazem 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.
One question I have is (1) how dropping omitting things would make it easier for engineers and (2) if there are packages that are high enough quality and useful for engineers, why having them would hurt having them distributed with the main Sage. Is half a GB "too big" for the modern engineer's computer? I think more useful would be a tutorial (or several) written specifically from an engineering perspective, and if you think the current environment is lacking, it would be good to implement a top- level command that would pre-define a bunch of functions and variables useful for engineers (and could even go install optional packages if they're not present). I just see this being way more useful (and lots easier) than shipping a separate version of Sage, and saying "oh, in this version, do this, and in that version do that, and you can't do this in this version..." - Robert --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
