Something like the information provided at http://www.sagemath.org/doc/thematic_tutorials/tutorial-objects-and-classes.html#sage-specifics-about-classes would be nice to have for an mathematical object in general. A good start would be the blog post at sagemath.blogspot.com from William, explaining the coercion model: http://sagemath.blogspot.de/2010/11/brief-history-and-motivation-behind.html I think it is the wrong way, that somebody who wants to start coding for sage must have to look at the source code to get a to learn something about the design and structure of sage.
greatz Johannes On 04.12.2012 05:18, Michael Orlitzky wrote: > On 12/03/2012 04:45 PM, William Stein wrote: >> >> Yes, it was kind of frustrating. Basically, David advertised it a >> lot, but at the end of the day, basically few people were available to >> come to a Sage Days on improving the documentation, even with all >> expenses paid... >> >> If anybody reading this has any experience with how to dramatically >> improve reference documentation of a big open source software project, >> please share. One difficulty with Sage is that there is probably >> no human alive who can really understand all of what Sage does, due to >> how many areas of advanced mathematics Sage touches, so whatever we do >> simply can't be a one-person project. In this regard, the scope >> of Magma is actually much smaller than that of Sage, since, e.g., >> Magma includes nothing in symbolic calculus and almost nothing in >> numerical analysis, which are two massive areas. >> >> Somebody asserted above that the Sage reference manual is supposed to >> cover "all the functionality of Sage". However, this is not what it >> does, and I'm not sure it should. The reference manual covers most of >> the functionality of the core Sage library, which -- depending on your >> perspective -- may or may not be a big part of what Sage does (for >> you). For example, an undergrad recently asked me how to find out >> about what Sage can do in signal processing, and I definitely didn't >> suggest that he read the Sage reference manual; instead, I suggested >> the scipy website. Another example: Cython is a big part of Sage, >> but it isn't documented in the reference manual. >> > > The existing thematic tutorials sort-of address this problem: > > http://www.sagemath.org/doc/thematic_tutorials/ > > but there are far too few of them. I would suggest creating a magma-like > hierarchy of thematic tutorials, one for each branch that Sage supports. > > The tutorials could link to individual pages of the reference manual, > and should go through most common tasks that people might want to do. It > should also have brief translations for users of other CAS software. See > Rosetta Code <http://rosettacode.org/> for an example of this done well. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel?hl=en.
