On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 12:10 PM, rjf <fate...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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).
FUD. Sage does *vastly* more than "rewrite working software". > 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." This certainly happens. > It becomes marketing hype if you add > the phrase "... and it will be better because it is in Python." There are clear advantages to Python over Lisp that go far beyond marketing hype. It is perhaps the world's most popular scripting language, and certainly in the top 2 or 3. That does add genuine value. > 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. FUD. Maxima is slow at many things, because of very dated algorithms and implementation issues. This has little to do with pexpect. I wish Maxima weren't slow (say compared to Magma), since that would make my life much easier. It's worth pointing out that Sage switched form using Maxima for symbolic manipulation to (a massively modified version of) GINAC in May 2009. http://www.ginac.de/ and http://pynac.sagemath.org/ Maxima is used now only for certain specific capabilities not available in GINAC, including symbolic integration, formal symbolic summation, limits, etc. But it's not used for basic symbolic manipulation anymore. > 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 ^^^^^^^ The statement is "Mission: Creating a viable free open source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica and Matlab." Your assertion is wrong on two counts: (1) There is nothing about "new" there. (2) There is no claim that Sage *is* a viable alternative yet. > it often just calls Maxima, already a viable alternative to Maple and > Mathematica, Maxima is not a viable alternative to Maple and Mathematica, for most potential users. I really wish it were. > a reality that it attempts to conceal (see NSF proposal > draft). I'm not hiding anything. > Until something goes wrong, and then it blames Maxima.(see > Sage-support). FUD. We do not blame Maxima whenever anything goes wrong. There are over 800 bugs listed in the Sage trac database, and the *vast majority* have nothing to do with Maxima. We "blame" Maxima when we run into a Maxima bug, or a mistake in our understanding of Maxima. It is worth noting also that actual Maxima developers (which RJF is not these days, so far as I can tell) who have ever communicated with anybody involved in the Sage project have been very _supportive_ of the Sage project. I'm thinking in particular of Robert Dodier. > 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. The above is the typical kind of statement that comes form somebody who doesn't understand mathematical research at all... combined with the sort of statement that comes from somebody who doesn't understand open source either. * For mathematicians: Open source addresses the "proof" part of research mathematicians curiosity. * For companies: open source is something entirely different altogether -- it's the power to know they can change the software however they want. For some people it's just nice to save money. Often open source software is just solidly better quality and more functionality software than anything closed source out there. It happens, and most of us know examples that we personally use. > 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 ? FUD. No they don't have to do that. Moreover, in my experience Matlab is (vastly) more difficult to install that Sage, due to copy protection. > 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? Is that Maxima? 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
