David Kirby's comments on competition stuck in my mind as I was doing some errands this morning, and his repeating them suggested to me that maybe I should comment again.
For a start, the healthy competition he refers to between Intel and AMD. Perhaps he has not noticed the substantial amount of money spent on lawyers and suits? Intel settles a lawsuit for 1.25 BILLION dollars. That's not an indication of health. Has the competition in computer chips been healthy? I think most academics viewed the Motorola 68020 CPU as a better design than the Intel chip of the same generation. It was used in the Sun workstations of 1980 (or so). Yet Intel prevailed because IBM had market strength. Other good (better than Intel?) designs came and went, using up huge amounts of intellectual effort, time, money. Sun SPARC, MIPS, HP, IBM Power-PC, etc etc. Did the best design win? Where would we be (say, in terms of taking advantage of parallel computers) if one of the other designs prevailed, say one of the parallel computing companies of the 1980s? Tandem? Encore? for just a few of them.. And that is not even touching the competition in mainframe computers like IBM and Amdahl. While I am not opposed to competition per se, I am quite doubtful of some of the competition proposed here. For example, claiming great advantages to rewriting working software in the language du jour (currently, Python). This is not competition, it is waste. It might be excusable if one says "student X wants to learn technology Y, so he will write a new program." It becomes marketing hype if you add the phrase "... and it will be better because it is in Python." It is further questionable if the claim is accompanied by accusations that the old program is slow, when it is technology like pexpect that is the bottleneck, etc etc. And it is also hard to give much credit to a system that advertises itself as a new viable alternative to Maple and Mathematica when the fact is that it often just calls Maxima, already a viable alternative to Maple and Mathematica, a reality that it attempts to conceal (see NSF proposal draft). Until something goes wrong, and then it blames Maxima.(see Sage-support). I think that any company that chooses to use Sage instead of buying Mathematica would be unlikely to do so because Sage is open-source and can therefore be "verified". While Sage might be free, the expense of that company in hiring a person to check the verification would be substantial, and probably pointless. Proving that a program matches a specification or some other indication of correctness is not something done casually or cheaply. Verifying a program's result (whether from Mathematica, Maple, or Maxima) is typically done by quite other means than examining the code that produced it. I can recall no instance of a published program proof in symbolic computation for any non-trivial algorithm. Repeated proofs of the Extended Euclidean Algorithm (GCD) don't make the grade. Someone who has the choice between Mathematica and Sage may very well think: Oh Mathematica or Matlab or ... costs $X and I just load it on my machine(s). Oh Sage costs $0, and I have to designate a technician to compile and install it on my machines at expense $Y. Is Y>X ? more likely a decision will be made on the basis of persons in the company asking for one or the other, based on the availability of library of application code, or programs written by colleagues in that particular language (mathematica, python, matlab). Thus someone doing signal processing calculations will likely choose the system with the best signal processing library. Is that Sage? RJF On Nov 24, 5:41 am, mark mcclure <mcmcc...@unca.edu> wrote: > On Nov 23, 11:01 pm, mhampton <hampto...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > I thought that Mark McClure's post on another thread raised some > > interesting issues, and that it was worth responding to, but it was so > > tangential that it deserves a seperate thread: > > Thank you to Marshall for a thoughtful response. I agree with just > about > everything he said. > > Mark McClure -- 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
