> > 7) The application of software engineering is I feel an important > thing. I have tried to argue this before, with very little success, > suggesting William buy books on the topic for serious developers. I > note that this paper makes the same comments. > > I think that many Sage developers are familiar with these (as has been pointed out before), but the highly distributed nature of Sage development and the fact that no one person can come close to knowing the entire codebase makes applying a lot of these principles very hard. The consensus-driven model Sage uses also makes this challenging - witness the discussion about 0-based versus 1-based permutations... Fred Brooks has some good comments about the "bazaar" method of development in The Design of Design, though I don't necessarily agree with everything he says there; his point about many supposedly "bazaar" projects starting with (or continuing with) a very clear vision and design from one person is spot on, and I think that some modules in Sage that have been shepherded largely by one or two people for a long time show this. It would be nice in principle, but in practice there are a lot of constraints - mostly time and the desire to get actual math in Sage - that make stopping all Sage development until everyone has had a proper course in software engineering hard.
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