Hi! Since William's statement, that Sage failed as a real alternative to the 4 MMs there are currently some threads with thoughts on improving Sage.
But till now I see only discussions among the devlopers. But I think we should also ask the users. The most of us here are scientists. But to make Sage successful we have to be more considerate about a big block of non mathematicians and beginners, which are a big portion of potential users. I don't think that the functionality of Sage is the big problem, in fact Sage has a great features for zero cost. A bigger problem is that Sage is lacking good 'user experience'. This starts already with installation. We still don't have a good Windows version, and you can't install Sage from the standard repos of your favorite distribution. SageMathCloud overcomes some of these problems by providing an out of the box we interface, but there are still people who want something to install on their hard drive. Especially If they don't want to go online for security reasons, or want to use their own hardware. Additionally it often appears to me that sage lacks of clean design. So I ask: Are there any serious attempts to analyze standard user needs more systematically? (And I don't talk about bug reports) I didn't find any except for a survey from 2009. I think it is very important to get at least some clues about 1. What do most need people for their daily needs 2. How well does these standard tasks work. I give an example from my personal experience: Many people have purely numerical tasks with little symbolics involved (classical in engineering) so they will use much of numpy functionality. If they use Sage then they often will get annoyed by the preparser not handling numpy/scipy well. I know at least 3 people, which switched to IPython+Sympy because of that reason. Not because Sage isn't worse, but some things don't go along very well. A keen Sage user now would simply turn the preparser off. And that would be the answer. This may seem quite trivial to developers which work on far harder topics and are good programmers. Personally I don't have problems tinkering around a bit. But 'normal' people will 1. not read the docu, simply want that it works out of the box 2. not ask for support Most users simply want to input some formulas and want the problem be solved quite elegantly, The feeling is very important. So what can we do? We have to ask the users! In the information age it shouldn't be such a big deal to make some standard surveys on SageMathCloud and Sagemath.org. Of course a short one. Another good start would be make some simple standard tasks as an excercise sheet for students which don't know Sage (e.g. first training session in a math course using sage). Then let the students solve them on their own, and finally let them fill in a form, what they liked and what not, what was difficult, what easy. I know the most of the developers are scientists, and don't care much about good 'marketing'. But think of Henry Ford: He didn't built the best cars the automotif sector t his time, but he gave people what they needed, and hence was successful. I hope I made my concerns clear. Best regards, Stefan -- 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.
