On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 4:15 PM, rjf <fate...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > On Nov 23, 3:49 pm, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: >> On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 1:04 PM,rjf<fate...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> > "venerable" Maxima is mentioned once, suggesting that the only thing >> >> > it can do is symbolic integration and numeric integration. >> >> > Actually, while Maxima includes library access to Fortran methods, it >> >> > is far inferior to what could be done in numeric integration, >> >> > as demonstrated by recent Mathematica versions. You would hardly get a >> >> > hint that 75% of the sage-support messages are about Maxima. >> >> >> No they aren't. >> >> > I have supplied the calculation already. Open up a sage-support >> > window. There are 3480 or so messages. Now search for "maxima" and you >> > will have a hit on 75% of them. >> >> That metric does not give 75%. This page shows that there are a >> total of 16521 messages in sage-support: >> >> http://groups.google.com/group/sage-support/about >> >> Searching maxima yields 2620 results: >> >> http://groups.google.com/group/sage-support/search?group=sage-support... >> >> We have >> >> 2620/16521 = 0.158586042007... >> >> or "about 16%". >> >> CAVEAT: I don't trust Google groups search results. Take the above >> with a grain of salt. >> >> William > > You are right! I was taking the number of MESSAGES and dividing by > the number of DISCUSSIONS. > So the average discussion has about 16500/3400 or 4.8 messages. > The count I was looking at was not the relevant one. > Thanks for examining the statistics. Frankly, I was surprised at the > 75%, but didn't understand where I went wrong. > > > So only about a sixth of all support messages mention maxima. Given > that there are some 100 components to Sage > I think that is still quite a large percentage. > > It may be worthwhile pondering Tim's comment... > > "NSF will not fund software development that competes with > existing commercial software." > > Here are two themes for proposals: > > 1. "we are doing this great new mathematics and the best way to do > this work is for us to write programs and run them." > > 2. "we are writing this program so that people (engineers, > mathematicians, students) will have a viable alternative to > Mathematica." > > Which kind of proposal did NSF fund last time?
Judge for yourself: http://wstein.org/grants/sage-06/ The only fixed rule I know about NSF is that they fund stuff that "promotes the progress of science; advances the national health, prosperity, and welfare; secures the national defense…" They also specifically "Foster and support the development and use of computers and other scientific methods and technologies, primarily for research and education in the sciences." See http://www.nsf.gov/about/glance.jsp They are an organization of _people_ that continually reinvents itself, subject to the guidelines at the above page, regularly gets new directors, employees, etc. And they are generally relatively honest and scrupulous about avoiding conflict of interest. I like 'em. -- William -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
