On 11/15/2010 8:54 PM, Robert Bradshaw wrote:
On Sun, Nov 14, 2010 at 11:45 AM, Dr. David Kirkby
<david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote:
On 11/14/10 07:00 PM, Tim Daly wrote:
I find it amusing that mathematicians are being told that
a math-specific language is a liability. Mathematics is,
after all, a specialized language that took me years to
learn.
Creating, learning, and maintaining a math-specific language is not
free, and perhaps one of the few strands of consensus in this thread
is that it's very difficult to do right. The marginal advantages over
using a (suitable) general purpose language is, IMHO, not worth the
cost. Using a general purpose language has several advantages, most of
which have been discussed to death already.
Actually, I do not believe that the current way we do mathematics
by computers is correct but that discussion takes us WAY off thread
and this isn't the forum for that anyway.
Was the adoption of the special(er) purpose Spad language helpful in
attracting users and/or developers for Axiom?
No, I'm sure that it did not attract more users. What it did do was
make the language much closer to the mathematics. Spad is a general
purpose programming language, uses indentation like Python, and is quite
similar to python syntax and semantics. In fact, it allows things
quite beyond python, like nested list comprehensions, full multiline
closures, general argument destructuring, etc. If you are a python
programmer you would find Spad to be "python 4.0". It also compiles
to exceptionally efficient code without needing Cython.
I do think that python is not actually the "language" of Sage.
I think the Sage language is unnamed at the moment. I've been a paid
professional python programmer and I still struggle with Sage (which
I build occasionlly to cross-check Axiom). The Sage language has a
lot of things like QQ which is nowhere in the python language. Saying
that Sage is written in python seems like saying that mathematics is
written in english (there I go with those analogies again...). Most
english speakers cannot read or write mathematics and most python
programmers cannot read or write sage programs.
Maple is a very C-like language, which has a much larger audience
than python. I am not sure that this attracted more users to Maple.
I am not sure that attracting users to CAS systems has anything to
do with the language. Generally you don't reach the language issue
until you've used a CAS as a fancy calculator for a while.
In any case, my original point was that in becoming a computational
mathematician the CAS language is the least of your problems.
Tim Daly
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