On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 7:43 AM, rjf <fate...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > On Apr 25, 11:43 am, David Joyner <wdjoy...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Hi: >> >> I just started preparing for a talk next Friday in an >> NSF workshop on "Future Directions of Computaton >> Research" in the "Symbolic Software Design" section. Therefore, >> I think I should say something about the work on pynac >> and how it will be replacing maxima. I tried the wiki to >> see what was there on this but the wiki seems to >> be down. > > .... > I would be quite interested in seeing a defense of this idea, because, > to me, it seems like quite a bad notion. > > Replacing Maxima (which is [being treated as..] free/open) with > another [free/open] package, yet to be written, but which starts with > a package which does substantially less (if I understand the > description of pynac as Ginac), makes sense only if your mind set is > "lisp is bad, python is good".
It is. > If your goal is to compete with Maple and Mathematica, you will also > have to program all of the facilities in those systems as well in > pynac. Yes, we have to implement the mathematical features of those systems that users need. > Why should the NSF fund this? It could fund people to start with > Maxima and add facilities, instead of reproducing Maxima. It could > fund people to improve Maxima's efficiency, or even include Ginac into > Maxima. Or it could just fund anyone who needs Mathematica or Maple to > just buy a copy. Which is what most reasonable funding agencies would > do if one of their grant-holders requested it. > > And as far as open source goes, you say > "With open source software, > ideally it is possible for anyone who is sufficiently comfortable with > the im- > plementation programming language to find and fix bugs by analyzing > the > code, especially if the implementation language is easy to learn and > readable. > This increases reliability because it exposes the flaws (if any) in > the source > code to more eyes, and is critical to long-term maintainability." > > This cuts two ways. A person, once given suitable open access to > code, can mistakenly identify what he thinks is a bug and "fix" it. > And then (if your protocol requires it) he may even convince another > person that the fix is right, when it isn't. > > Some errors are very subtle and will not appear except in very long- > running or obscure tests. > The reliability of elaborate code will not be improved because no one > really wants to re-think such programs, and even an attempt to do so > will not likely result in fixes -- witness the statistics on how many > more bugs are introduced in the process of fixing bugs. > > I don't know what your experience has been in Sage, but the idea that > many eyes make all bugs shallow may not apply in a case where only one > or two people have the understanding to write or read a program > regardless of how nice the language is. This belief you have that only 2 people are smart enough to work on certain parts of mathematical software reminds me of what Stephen Wolfram says in defense of Mathematica being closed source (e.g., his remarks in that recent video were very similar). I am highly impressed and *humbled* by the intelligence and capabilities of the hundreds of people who have contributed to Sage. > I hope these comments, negative as they may seem, provide some help > in formulating your position paper. Thanks. I strongly recommend taking anything RJF says with a grain of salt, since he seems to have a bone to pick against "pure mathematics" for taking funding from computer science. Also, he has personal commercial interest in lisp, and a strong bias toward Maxima as he is one of the original authors. > > RJF > > > > > -- William Stein Associate Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
