Dear all, I would like to try to build constructively on the following statement and reply:
William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> writes: > On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 9:16 AM, rjf<fate...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> In terms of support, one major disadvantage of Sage, I think, is that >> significant pieces of the implementation apparently consists of >> pieces of code that are used as black boxes, and that the >> Sagemeisters proudly disavow knowledge of. Thus a bug traced to >> Maxima is unfixable "until we rewrite Maxima in python". >> [...] > > There is precisely one component of Sage that has the above property, > and that is Maxima. There are absolutely no other such components. > Fortunately this won't be the case forever. It seems to me that this conversation is not about a technical problem, but rather a human one, and I think (since affected myself) that it's even more important. It seems to me that sage is a huge success. Part of it's success story is very likely the (in my opinion: wise) decision to use other software as is, at least as a start. However, as sage matures, more and more porting work starts to be done, at least this is what appears to be the case to me. Now, how does it *feel* if you wrote or contributed to a package, which is in the end ported (by somebody else) to sage? (Especially, if the original package is not that much of a "community" success.) How does it *feel* if sage uses a package for years, but with the declared goal to replace it as soon as possible? At least for me, it feels *really bad*. (...and I guess, in fact, I know, that I'm not the only person having these feelings...) I do not know how to remedy this, but I believe that it would be a great service to the "computer algebra developer" community, if this problem were recognised and adressed. I can imagine, however, that it's really difficult to adress it. And, of course, I may be wrong and it's not important at all, since sage is something technical. While I'm at it, I also perceive another obstacle to "complete happiness", which I'd like to mention, although it's entirely completely unrelated to the above: humour seems to vary wildly across the earth, and even between neighbours. I found William's april fool joke *not funny at all* and it took a lot of help from a colleague/friend (and sage developer, guess who :-) to understand that it was (probably) not meant to offend. A similar example, demonstrating how such differences can even endanger a community, can be found on comp.lang.lisp in the r.i.p. erik naggum thread. Martin PS: sorry not to have said "thank you" earlier to William providing the hint on how to make sage run on my old laptop again. Here goes: thank you! :-) --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
