On 4 December 2010 05:32, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 6:40 PM, David Kirkby <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote:
>> It's clear you have the ability to write decent tests, but I think its >> fair to say there are a lot of Sage developers who have less knowledge >> of this subject than you [=Bradshaw]. > > True. However, I think the general mathematical background of the > average Sage developer is fairly high. If you look down the second > column of > http://sagemath.org/development-map.html > > you'll see many have Ph.D.'s in mathematics, and most of those who > don't are currently getting Ph.D.'s in math. This presupposes that people of fairly high mathematical knowledge are good at writing software. I'm yet to be convinced that having a PhD in maths, or studying for one, makes you good at writing software tests. Unless those people have studied the different sort of testing techniques available - white box, black box, fuzz etc, then I fail to see how they can be in a good position to write the tests. It's fairly clear in the past that the "Expected" result from a test is what someone happened to get on their computer, and they did not appear to be aware that the same would not be true of other processors. Vladimir Bondarenko.has been very effective at finding bugs in commercial maths software by use of various testing techniques, yet I think I'm correct in saying Vladimir does not have a maths degree of any soft. >> As such, I believe independent verification using other software is >> useful. Someone remarked earlier it is common in the commercial world >> to compare your results to that of competitive products. > > +1 -- it's definitely useful. Everyone should use it when possible > in some ways. I'm still waiting to hear from Wolfram Research on the use of Wolfram Alpha for this. Personally I don't think there's anything in the terms of use of Wolfram Alpha stopping use of the software for this, but someone (I forget who), did question whether it is within the terms of use or not. > But consistency comparisons using all open source software when > possible are very useful indeed, since they are more maintainable > longterm. Yes. Especially if Wolfram Research thought it would hurt their revenue from Mathematica sales, they could very easy re-write the terms of use to disallow the use of Wolfram Alpha to check other software. > -- William Dave -- 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
