On 1 October 2015 at 05:47, Juan Luis Cano <juanlu...@gmail.com> wrote: > ... > The situation got better over the years (the IPython notebook was born, then > Anaconda came to scene so I never ever had to recompile NumPy again) and > it's been ages since I last used (and recommended) Sage for any real work. > Perhaps Sage symbolics are better than SymPy - but what's the cost? I do not > know a single classmate who would find in Sage a key functionality missing > in the "SciPy stack". Let me stress again that we are engineers - most of > what we do is solving ODEs, plotting and reading from files. >
+1 There is one original feature unique to Sage however that originally attracted me to Sage in the very early years and which continues to motivate my interest. This originally was summed up in a seemingly trite slogan like: "Building the car, not re-inventing the wheel" but which no longer seems very evident. That is the Python-based "glue" that makes it possible for very different "external" packages such as Maxima, Gap, Singular, Octave and many others (including especially in my case FriCAS) to appear as objects within a universal interface in Sage. I have been disappointed about the apparent shift in Sage away from this goal. On the other hand I am very encouraged by the continued development of SMC which makes exactly the kind of transition that Juan describes very easy while retaining the "glue" implemented in Sage. > I have been reading very closely all William posts about the topic and am > honestly worried about Sage's future, because it's a project I still love. > Its developers have poured a tremendously big amount of top-quality, unpaid > work. But I agree with others that the project diversified too much and > maybe should start *dropping* things instead of *adding* things. What about > "Being a viable alternative to Magma" - and leave the rest of the Ma's out? As a core developmental strategy for Sage this seems like a reasonable goal to me (although I do not anticipate any immediate need for this kind of functionality in my own work). Maybe this is a logical extension of the combinat work on the "category framework" in Sage. Unfortunately while I am very much in favor of the category/domain approach of Axiom and related systems, I find the Sage implementation of this idea almost entirely indigestible. Perhaps this is not the case for a sufficiently large number of potential Sage developers. I am sorry, but I do not think an emphasis on STEM-oriented features in Sage is likely to have a big impact on it's use or development. It could however it could potentially contribute a lot to the wider adoption of SMC and I agree that that would be a good thing. Unfortunately there are already a number of both open and proprietary competitors in this highly commercialized and commercializable field. > What about removing something of those 800 Mb? Splitting core functionality > and making it available through pip and conda on PyPI? Stating it as a > federation of projects? Focus on its strengths and its present community > (that is: pure mathematics) rather than pleasing everybody? > +1 To me "federation" is exactly what Sage was *originally* about. -- 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.
