Hi sage-devel This is to announce and get some feedback on the start of a Sage software-development project.
This spring, Daniel Augot, Clément Pernet and I got funding from INRIA for hiring a full-time software developer for two years to work on extending the coding theory functionality in Sage. We have hired David Lucas, who just started 1st October, and is already working on getting an overview of coding theory and Sage. The aim of the project is to implement a much larger basis of functionality for coding theory which is flexible, modular and useful for the many facets of coding theory: algebra, combinatorics, engineering, cryptography, etc. The current status is that there are many useful functions from a mostly combinatorical viewpoint. From an algebraic viewpoint, though one can construct the generator matrix of e.g. a Reed--Solomon code, there is no specific class or functionality which investigates such a code from its algebraic perspective (e.g. a fast decoder). We would like to implement such things and many other. We would like to discuss all details with the community, and we also hope that this project will get a ball rolling, reinvigorating the interest in Sage for the coding theory community. Most of these discussions are better taken on sage-coding-theory, since they will be quite specific to the field. It is my impression that such a full-time developer for Sage is a rare thing, and we have been thinking on how best to proceed and communicate goals and progress. Of course, all code will go through the Trac and thus indirectly progress is tracked. However, since this will be longer-running thing, our plan is to make a dedicated (small) web page with a road map as well as an overview of already written functionality (which is furthermore annotated as already included in Sage or not). This is not a blog, but just an overview for new-comers, people interested in the development, or people who previously rejected Sage for coding theory use but who might now reconsider it. One thing we have been thinking about how to handle well is development in parallel with the ticket/review system. Since David is working full-time, he will be producing a lot of code, and there will all the time be a significant backlog in the review process. Our fear is that juggling a cobweb of ticket dependencies might become clumsy if not handled well. Do people have ideas for handling this well? We expect that within 2-3 months, David has made the main refactorings of the existing coding theory functionality, and extended it in various ways to exercise the new structure. This will most likely be more or less internal (not on Trac). After this, he will start posting these changes to Trac, while in parallel continuing to develop more new functionality. Regards, Johan S. R. Nielsen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
