I'd like to wholeheartedly agree with Jonathan. First, free software: I work in chemistry for a large multinational company, and Sage has been really useful for me. I've used both Mathematica and Matlab there, but have dropped them - it is really hard to persuade managers to cough up the licence fees for on-going support unless you can point to a development project that will fail without them. The fees are eye-watering - typically 20% of purchase cost. Even if you do buy a copy and find the money for support, you can then only install it on one PC at work. With Sage, I can access in multiple places, including my home PC for working at home.
Second, the sophistication of maths in Sage. I dropped maths at 18, so I'm not doing anything sophisticated but the way I can do algebra, data manipulation and plotting in the same environment is great. I'm dealing with simple equations and small data sets (tens of points/<5 variables). But I don't need to chop and change between programs like with Matlab/Mathematica. The lack of sophistication needed by some of the folks here doesn't apply to me - or, I think, many chemists/biochemists. Third, web-based. Companies have large, paranoid IT departments so just downloading and installing stuff on a desktop can be impossible. Getting licence terms agreed for commercial software can takes weeks, and then you have to get the install authorised and done by IT support (the only ones with admin rights). Web is the way to go because it avoids those complications and makes it easy to share work and resource with colleagues - and you can probably get it squeezed onto a fast server which was created for some other application. Finally, Python. Learn Python and you are learning programming, unlike Mathematica or Matlab. It is a decent language with consistent syntax and it makes automating tasks so easy (last week, I added leave-n-out cross-validation to a fitting program in 20 minutes; I mention it because I'd expected it to take half a day). When you've learned Python in Sage, you can use it elsewhere! The downsides? Well, the Sage install is huge so that is off-putting, loading modules like matplotlib and R isn't intuitive and getting data in is a pain as others have commented. A simple CSV upload utility would be nice... Those are just my perspectives. I agree completely with William that SMC is the way to go, because of the ease of access. I think students may be an area to aim at because of a) Python b) Python c) Python d) not having to install anything e) being able to do maths (differentiation etc) easily to understand the physical basis of many phenomena and then compare it with your results. Symbolic maths was a revelation to me when I discovered it as a post-doc (!), and I think it still would be to many undergrads in chemistry/biochem/biology. I'd love to have the time to put together some in interactive worksheets to go with textbooks, as some of the course tutors here have. As also noted, the commercial Ma's do offer very very cheap subscriptions to students so I think that's less of a consideration. Peter. -- 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.
