Ah, it seems that you do not actually want expert mathematicians who are not expert coders to contribute code to Sage.
Perhaps this could be documented somewhere. On Apr 2, 4:18 pm, David Kirkby <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote: > On 2 April 2011 14:20, Bill Hart <goodwillh...@googlemail.com> wrote: > > > Please also bear in mind that many "upstream" developers have put > > years of their life into research, development of algorithms and > > coding. Many of them are professional mathematicians, not computer > > scientists or professional programmers. They live and die by theorems, > > grants, teaching, publications, etc., not language standards and may > > only care if their code works for them and their immediate friends! > > They very often do not have time to maintain it to the high standard > > they might prefer, and their donation of their code is made on that > > understanding. > > Fair enough, but I would hope the quality control in Sage would > prevent poor code being merged in the first place. That does not seem > to have been so, though I think the situation is improving somewhat. > > I would not expect to see code written by pilots controlling aircraft > or code written by medical staff controlling medical equipment. > > OK, these are extreme cases, but happen to be two industries I have > worked in (aeronautical and medical), though I have never had to write > safety-critical software for either industry. > > > There's a fine line between critiquing/refereeing/improving code and > > ridiculing it. > > Very true, but the fact it is in Sage, does cause frustration. I > suspect it was frustration which was the provocation for the initial > rather harsh comments on this thread. > > There are bits of code in Sage, which even a cursory glance at the > source code, or a look at the compiler warnings, should have in my > opinion stopped it being in Sage before it was cleaned up. > > If the code was thought to be very useful (like Sympow), but of > dubious quality (you yourself once wrote Sympow was "virtually > obfuscated") > > https://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel/msg/d7aef307c15de2e6?hl=en > > then perhaps it should have remained experimental. Or perhaps it > should have never been put in Sage, but people used it external to > Sage. > > 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
