Hey, I'm with you there Marshall! I am going to create a Mathematica fork of Sage, where everything in Sage will be rewritten in Mathematica. I'll start simple, say with the basic commands on group theory and ring theory. Let's see, a name? Got it. I'ill call the fork "Mathematica Basic Sage" or "Mathematica BS" for short.
Can I interest anyone in my Mathematica BS? On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 2:52 PM, Marshall Hampton <hampto...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I am deeply disappointed in the direction you are proposing. If you > are going to switch languages at this point, it should be to a more > modern language than Lisp. So I plan on forking the Sage project with > a Haskell rewrite. I think time will tell which is the better choice. > > I am open to ideas about what a Haskell-based sage should be called. > > Cheers, > Marshll Hampton > > On Apr 1, 12:59 pm, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Hi, >> >> About two years ago we made the painful transition from using Darcs to >> Mercurial for our revision control system. This was difficult, but had >> to be done because it was hard to get Darcs to run everywhere, and >> there were weird corner cases where Darcs would hang. Mercurial isn't >> optimal but it gets the job done. >> >> Frankly, I think we have similar problems using Python at the core of >> Sage. I've been thinking very hard about how to deal with this for >> nearly a year now, and have come to the conclusion that we should make >> a switch from using Python at the core of Sage to Lisp. The >> transition won't be easy, but it will be well worth the effort, since >> in the time frame I have in mind (30 years, say) I see Lisp really >> taking off, and despite its faults, anyone who has used Lisp a lot >> knows that Lisp is clearly a far better language than Python in >> several critical ways. The strategy for switching will go something >> like this: >> >> 1. Forking: We fork clisp. We have been using clisp for several >> years now in Sage, so we're very familiar with their build system. >> However, they don't make regular releases, and their foreign function >> interface is severely lacking, as is their Solaris support. So we're >> forking, and will call the fork LispX. I've talked with Robert >> Bradshaw about creating a new language called CylispX, which will be >> similar to Cython but for LispX, and I'm confident we can pull this >> off. >> >> 2. Porting: We have an intense sequence if "Lisp days", both >> workshops and 1-day long IRC events, where we go line-by-line through >> the Sage library and rewrite everything in Lisp. As we go, we'll >> make sure that the rewritten code is always at least as fast as the >> original code (this shouldn't be a problem, because of LispX's >> extremely good profiling and dynamic optimization features). I hope >> everyone here is willing to pitch in significant time to this effort. >> If you're not, I would really like to know what your concerns are. >> >> 3. Polish: I estimate step 2 will take about 3 years, given the >> amount of time it took to write the original Sage library, and also >> the level of familiarity of most Sage developers with Lisp. Also, we >> will likely run into subtle snags with SageLisp's interface for >> calling C functions. But with everybody's hard work, we'll get >> through this. >> >> 4. Sage-4.0: On April 1, 2012, we'll release Sage-4.0, which will be >> the complete Lisp-rewritten version of Sage. We will then get to work >> on porting all of the nasty C/C++/Fortran dependencies in Sage to >> Lisp. We'll likely start with GMP/MPIR (we may have to fork, though I >> *hope* Bill Hart will be on board), then moving onto mpfr, mpfi, >> FLINT, PARI, etc. I estimate that with lots of hard work by everybody >> reading this email, we can accomplish this in at most 4 years. This >> will be a great contribution to mankind. >> >> 5. Finally, on April 1, 2016, we'll release Sage-5.0, the fully >> Lisp-ified Sage. We will then get back to porting Sage to Windows, >> Solaris, and implementing new functionality for combinatorics, linear >> algebra, number theory, algebraic geometry, optimization, etc. >> >> If anybody isn't 100% convinced that this change isn't -- in the long >> run (30 years) -- well worth our effort, please respond. >> >> -- Best Regards, >> William Stein >> >> -- >> William Stein >> Associate Professor of Mathematics >> University of Washingtonhttp://wstein.org > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
