This is such an amusing thread. Try re-reading the thread as if everyone were arguing that "we should improve Maxima because it is open source and many people can improve upon it". Sure, you'd have to learn lisp but Guido argues that python is lisp, so is the learning curve so steep?
On average over the lifetime of a project, code costs about $43 per line. That means that Maxima is worth about $10,750,000 million dollars. At a really productive rate of 100 lines of debugged code per day that's 2500 days, or 10 years of work (5days x 50weeks) If you had 250k lines of python and someone said "lets rewrite it in Java because ...." then you would assume the person is misguided. But you have 250k lines of lisp and now you argue "lets rewrite it in Python because....". Maxima is old, reliable, solid code that can and does run in Sage. There are porting issues but the total work required to debug a port is completely dwarfed by the total work to write and debug a python verion. If you believe that porting issues are lisp-specific, the transition to python 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, .... might convince you otherwise (eventually). I don't have a dog in this fight so I don't care either way. I'm just entertained by all of the "open source is great" arguments that gets applied to everything but Maxima and lisp. Tim Daly --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
