On Thu, Oct 17, 2013 at 3:18 PM, Dr. David Kirkby <drkir...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12 October 2013 18:21, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Maybe. One important fact is that -- measured by downloads or website
>> hits -- usage of Sage ("the free software") has *not* grown at all in
>> the last 3 years. For example, if you define number of active users as
>> at http://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/1000, then the number of users has
>> floated between 10,000 and 15,000 for several years. This suggests
>> perhaps Sage is not fully succeeding at the mission statement I set
>> for the project at the beginning, which is to provide a viable
>> alternative to the Ma's, since they claim much larger active usage
>> numbers.
>
> I do wonder where they get their numbers from some times. Wolfram
> Research claimed over a million users more than a decade ago, but why
> do I see so few jobs wanting Mathematica skills? Search on a job site
> for jobs needing MATLAB and there are tons of them. Do the same for
> Mathematica, and there are very very few indeed. I do wonder how large
> the user base of Mathematica really is.
I think (jobs needing Mathematica) << (jobs where Mathematica is/could
be used). In my (limited) experience, Matlab lends itself more to
being part of a full infrastructure/system which increases its
necessity to do a job vs. "use whatever tool you're comfortable with."
The numeric vs. symbolic emphasis naturally biases it towards the
industry (jobs) vs. academia too. (I can't imagine an Math Prof.
listing that requires familiarity with Mathematica, outside of perhaps
teaching.)
Also, don't discount the (millions?) of college freshmen that use it
once a week in their calculus lab :).
- Robert
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