On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 4:44 AM, parisse <bernard.pari...@ujf-grenoble.fr> wrote: > Regarding the mission statement, I'm a little bit skeptic one can build a > viable alternative to Magma on one side and Maple, Mathematica, Matlab on > the other side. Magma is a very specialized software that is probably > unknown to most mathematicians, and almost certainly unknown in other > scientific fields, while most mathematicians and many scientists in other > fields have heard about Maple, Mathematica and Matlab. From my very little > experience trying sagemath, the system seems to me to be more designed to be > an alternative to Magma than to Maple, Mathematica or Matlab.
I also find the lofty goal of the "mission statement" to be terrifyingly daunting. Just to clarify (and make things easier), the mission statement, and indeed Sage itself, is about the *entire ecosystem* of open source math software, including your software (Giac, which is of course installed on SageMathCloud). This is why Sage has always had interfaces to most other computer algebra systems, why a large amount of effort has been put into making Python interact well with Maxima, Singular, etc., and why one of our slogans is "Building the car instead of reinventing the wheel". With SageMathCloud, we seem to be putting all open source math software in one place so that it is very easy for the casual user to at least get access to (say for a quick lab assignment). I would have tried to do that with Sage itself, but the difficulty is just way too daunting. For example, in SMC we have Jupyter notebooks with the Octave kernel -- I tried going through the basic matlab tutorial on the matlab website and everything worked perfectly. For the goal of creating a viable free open source alternative to the Ma's, let's just fully work with the Jupyter and Octave devs and feature their work (e.g., https://github.com/sagemathinc/smc/issues/65). Much of the Python library we have developed called "sage" is (or at least was initially) mainly focused on functionality that was only available in Magma, since that was a huge gap in the available open source code at the time. However, if you look at open source more generally, and even what comes with the Sage distribution, you'll find that there are many extremely nice Python libraries that significantly overlap with Matlab (etc.): numpy, scipy, matplotlib, pandas, etc. For example, matplotlib provides 2d plotting that is very similar to what is in Matlab, and numpy provides very similar matrix functionality. I talk to a lot of users, and realize that the fact that MATLAB-like functionality is in Sage is very non obvious (we barely mention it in our reference manual); in fact, that Sage even has anything to do with Python is not at all clear to many Sage users. One of the undergrads working for me this quarter on Sage said that he had to use Sage in a math class last year and at first thought it was some crazy math language... then eventually realized -- "heh, this is Python! I know Python. Or at least, I know how to search stackoverflow for how to do things in Python..." -- and his experience using Sage got much better. > Perhaps because it's fun to code something exciting related to your math > research while it's not fun to write interfaces, fix bugs, support windows, > write documentation targetting large number of students, code heuristics for > nice solvers and antiderivatives... Indeed -- I haven't had a lot of fun for the last few years doing the things needed to make SMC work. It's really painful. > That's probably the reason why Maple, > Mathematica and Matlab are commercial softwares: people doing the boring > work want to be rewarded for that. And you can not expect to be rewarded by > the math community, most mathematicians don't care about software > production, about opensourceness, just look how the scientific editors make > money with the work of mathematicians and scientists in general. > I don't know if the opendreamkit will succeed doing the boring work, but I > believe there are several obstacles: the proposed salaries, the career > perspectives, the code long term support... I agree. You can tell what ODK is supposed to do by looking at the grant materials, which has precise deliverables and timelines. It's lots of exciting non-boring work that got them the grant. ODK impact will be very positive for open source math software, but won't solve the hugely important "boring work" problem you mention above. -- William (http://wstein.org) -- 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 https://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
