Hi
> > IMHO, Sage should be aiming to be more like the professional maths package,
> > not
> > itunes or Firefox.
>
> What are they like? My main experience with deprecation in the Ma's
> is with Maple and Magma.
>
> - Maple -- has an idiotic, confusing and contradictory mix of upper
> and lowercase linear algebra functionality, because they are too
> scared to remove deprecated code. Yet still, they definitely do break
> old code with new Maple versions sometimes.
My experience with Maple is pretty old since I decided to leave maple for
MuPAD in 2001, but this was one of the main reason why we (the team in
Marne-la-Vallée) left them. We started from Maple version 2. And each release
until Maple version 7 has been a very large pain for us. At this time the
package ACE was already of a large size (approx 500 functions). Here are some
example of incompatibilities:
- change of the semantic of operation + and * for lists;
- change of the structure of a package;
- change of the indexation of the lists.
...
For us those were very fundamental change and our code needed to be completely
rewritten. I never launched a maple session since 2003, so that I don't know
if it's better now, but I don't think they had any care for backward
compatibilities at this time.
Note that my argument is twofold since they actually pushed me away...
By the way, though some part of sage are already very polished, I personally
think sage has being still in a beta stage. Lots of things are far from being
stable and moreover, it is very incoherent in its design from one part to the
other. Furthermore, the quality of the doc is very variable. I don't intend
any offense but I think this as a fact. We all do that on our spare time and
we all are inclined to do what we like.
As a consequence, pretending to be stable to early is very dangerous. I think
its a very good way to scare newcomers away. So I think we should keep our
extremely good work and not spend too much time pretending it is better than
it really is. I hope I'm won't offend anyone; I also hope that I'm not
starting a flamewar...
Cheers,
Florent
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