As one of the "non-mathematicians" (as a physical chemist who teaches quantum mechanics and kinetics = nonlinear differential equations and systems of differential equations, I'm not sure that is quite the right term, but I think you get the idea), I thought I should chime in.
1) I think SAGE has an adequate plan. It is a community project. The successful open source projects I know about serve a need for the community(s) they serve, because the actual users contribute code that does what they want. I am aware of exactly one piece of commercial code that actually does exactly what the users want (IgorPro by Wavemetrics, and that is because the programmers were actually laboratory scientists first and programmers second). The key here is that you need a few dedicated individuals directing the project and ensuring that it moves forward. For them it needs to be a nearly full- time job. I'm involved in the Jmol project and we depend on one person who does the bulk of the work. Finding these people is difficult because they need to be supported in some way. This means the software has to be important for a company or this person has to be an academic who can convince their institution that the work is worthwhile and scholarly. 2) I agree that SAGE could use more exposure. I have found it better for my teaching than Maple, which my institution has a license for. I can't speak of recent Mathematica editions, but I know that 15 years ago I found serious problems with it and gave up on it. Anyway, there are lots of people who could use SAGE, but there are two key issues: a) for Windows an install that runs in Windows as an application would be nice; b) for MacOS it would be nice to have a standard .app bundle. The key would be to set the server running and include an appropriate browser in the package (maybe just access Safari). Anyway, what people have worked on so far falls a little short in these two areas. Personally, I think we should all use a flavor of Linux, which would make Windows and MacOS a moot point, but that isn't very realistic. 3) I think the issue of crackpots and bad code dragging things down is not much of a problem. The reason is that it takes quite a bit of perseverance to get code into Sage. My experience with my Jmol contributions is an example. I would not claim to be the best coder, but think my Jmol contributions addressed some issues people had. And certainly the code is not yet ideal, but it does do most of what I understood people to want. Because of the load on people doing testing, it has taken months to get much feedback on it. This means anybody submitting code has to be willing to stick with it and prod it along over the long term. People who are not serious won't do this. My example may be a little slower than many people's because I also have very little time to contribute to this, but I still think you are unlikely to get really bad code included using the present model. Jonathan On Jan 27, 8:05 pm, Rob Beezer <goo...@beezer.cotse.net> wrote: > On Jan 27, 8:49 am, Niles <nil...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > * organize and unify (and document) the various sage options for > > building, testing, and startup > > +1 > > There are some suggestions > at:http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/10326#comment:9 > > and a fairly empty ticket at:http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/10429 > > Rob -- 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
