I glanced at the document and at William's response. Here are a few observations.
1. No native Windows version seems to me to be a big issue, but it has never been clear to me how hard it is for an ordinary user (not admin) to install emulation software, on a perhaps shared machine to run (or compile??) anything, much less Sage. 2. The reason for the recommended choice of language is to avoid languages with "long tool chains". I suppose that if you insisted on compiling a Lisp each time you downloaded it, instead of just downloading the executable version, some of them might have long tool chains. But the typical Lisp executable -- does it have ANY tool chain? Does gcc have a long tool chain? If you do not require bootstrapping (compiling) gcc on a bare machine (lacking any gcc), why should you require bootstrapping a lisp without a lisp executable? 3. As I've indicated previously, the mission statement is, in my view, not clear. The phrase "viable free open source alternative" is too vague. What is a viable alternative ? How does this goal differ from Maxima, Axiom, Reduce, Jacal, ... or for that matter, Octave? Is Maxima a viable free open source alternative? Would it be one if it were written in Python? I think that your goal is really to build the most inclusive darn "computer algebra system" you can, within your own self-imposed restrictions regarding languages, licensing, distribution, bootstrapping, shared responsibility, and especially the use of externally-provided free modules. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
