On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 9:51 AM, mark mcclure <mcmcc...@unca.edu> wrote: > > On Apr 29, 11:06 am, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: >> On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 6:20 AM, mark mcclure <mcmcc...@unca.edu> wrote: >> > The Q&A session includes several pointed >> > questions surrounding open source and freedom of access >> > to data. Some folks here might find the responses >> > interesting. >> >> Somebody asks why Mathematica/etc. is so closed, and he basically >> answers that for 10 years a lot of the Calculus code was included with >> Mathematica, but "*nobody* read it ...". Then he says about one >> function "it would take many Ph.D. theses of work to go through and >> figure out what all this code is doing." He's asked by the moderator >> whether he has is philosophically against including source code, and >> he says "no". > > Well, I said you might find it "interesting", not "enlightened". :) > > I think a lot of people on this group know that I'm a Mathematica > user and I hope you don't think I was forwarding this as a > representative of my views. Personally, I'm pretty middle of the > road when it comes to open source philosophy. I'm primarily > interested in Sage because I think it is a very good tool. I > would care less about Sage if it was open source, but not so good. > I think the general concept of open source is great, but maybe > not for some of the same reasons that folks here think. In > particular, I think it's great that I can look at source code to > learn and understand how things work. I think, though, that the > statement that you need open source in order to have verifiable > results is not really true.
> The fact is that bugs are found via > experimentation, not by reading source code. This is not a fact! I have a lot of experience finding and seeing bugs found, and I can tell you in no uncertain terms that a huge number of the bugs found in Sage are in fact found by reading source code. Very often when reading the source code for part of a program (such as Sage), one very naturally thinks up corner cases that will break the code, which would be highly unlikely for one to think of without reading the code (but of course will get hit in practice, maybe unbeknownst to the user). So the above assertion really doesn't agree with my personal experience. > On the other hand, I'll happily go on record as saying that I find > Wolfram's explanation of "Why You Do Not Usually Need to Know > about Internals" personally offensive. You can read that here: > http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/tutorial/WhyYouDoNotUsuallyNeedToKnowAboutInternals.html > > The funny thing about that statement is that no one who believes > it could possibly be inquisitive enough to be employed in a > technical position at Wolfram in the first place. I honestly > assume that virtually nobody there believes it. > > Mark I get the impression that maybe Wolfram believes almost everybody is "not so bright". Fortunately, he is wrong. 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
