Hi all On Feb 24, 2:24 pm, "Dr. David Kirkby" <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote: > Oscar Lazo wrote: > > > On 23 feb, 10:39, "Dr. David Kirkby" <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote: > >> If one sets up a Sage server for public use, there is the opportunity for > >> someone to publish worksheets, there is a section: > > >> "Browse published Sage worksheets > >> (no login required)" > > >> But often those worksheets are bad examples, error message, or just plain > >> people > >> experimenting. I do not think they generally reflect well on Sage. > > >> Hence I'd propose that there was a collection of worksheets that always > >> appeared > >> at the top, with sensible names and good examples. Then let the other > >> published > >> worksheets be shown below. > > >> Either that, or perhaps make it clear that anyone can edit these > >> worksheets, and > >> so many not represent how best to use Sage. > > >> One normally associates "published" work as being of high quality. But in > >> this > >> case the "published" can be anything. Whilst regular users of Sage will > >> know > >> what this means, for someone taking a quick glance, they are likely to get > >> the > >> wrong impression. > > > I strongly agree! I remember taking the bad impression you described > > when I first saw the published worksheets on sagenb.org . > > I'm glad I'm not the only one to feel this. > > > I don't > > think a rating system would work since there is already one, and it > > rarely gets used, sometimes good worksheets get bad rankings and vice > > versa. I think it would be best if people would just submit proposed > > worksheets for inclusion in the *good* category. > > Yes, agreed. > > Jaap Spies sent me a screen shot some time back, when I first set up a Sage > server on my own SPARC machine. I thought it was pretty impressive, so took > his > code and published it on the server running on 't2'. > > http://t2nb.math.washington.edu:8000/home/pub/3/ > > But there is also a published document which shows an error message, which has > since been resolved > > http://t2nb.math.washington.edu:8000/home/pub/1/ > > so that does not give a good impression (This is not aimed at a dig at Robert > who published it. He was trying to show me a problem. It's just an example of > the sort of things that get "published" ) > > > I further propose that some of these get included in new Sage notebook > > installs, so that people new to the notebook can inmediately click on > > already made notebooks and get some nice code that works. > > Yes, I think 30+ decent examples. Hopefully some where you do not need a > degree > in maths to know what they are about. >
I totally agree that good worksheet examples would be very useful for many reasons: having examples, learning small pieces of code from experienced users, getting a good first impression, etc etc. > I'm not a mathematician, but have an engineering background. When I look at > the > introductory examples for Mathematica, most are easily understood - graphs > plotting, factorization, integration, differentiation, numerical methods, > finding roots, curve fitting to data, etc. > > I think there is a bit too much emphasis of the examples of things only > understandable by those with a very good maths background. I've never before > come across the term "ring". To be a viable alternative to the Mathematica at > least, there needs to be more examples of usage by non-mathematicians. > > Dave I strongly agree on this! Even if there's nothing wrong with current emphasis, I think that there's a lot of potential in non-mathematics, but other sciences related users. For example, just having good examples of the well working integration with numpy and scipy would be very useful, maybe also to catch other problems :) I have still not a clear idea on which would be a good test case, but ideally a notebook with some symbolic calculation (using pynac, maxima or sympy) and further numerical evaluation using large arrays (using numpy) and possibly also scientific functions, would be VERY attractive, at least to many people I know. Regards Maurizio -- 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
