On Friday, April 8, 2016 at 12:26:22 PM UTC+1, Luca De Feo wrote: > > > This thread is first and foremost about reducing the friction involved > in making code that depends on the Sage distribution available to the world. > > Based on feedback I get from users, this friction is a very, very > significant problem to the growth of Sage. > > Let me recall something that comes up often, but that I haven't seen yet > in this thread nor at the Sage days. Just two weeks ago I was said: "We are > going to make our student write code in Magma, because we want something > future proof. We've used Sage a couple of times before, but each time Sage > updates break our code in <1yr, and it takes too much work to know why and > update our code". > > Let me stress that these are highly skilled researchers who develop > amazing software and have a very deep knowledge about programming. One of > them develops a library that is a core piece of infrastructure for Magma, > and which is responsible for a good fraction of the benchmarks where Magma > crushes Sage. If we could make these people stick to Sage, I can only > imagine benefits for us. >
mind you, Magma group invites such people for paid months-long visits, where they work on implementing these algorithms in close contact with Magma core devs. If only Sage could do this too... :-) > > I have this experience myself, though, being more involved in Sage, I make > the effort to patch my code to work with the latest stable. At some points > in time, it has even been impossible to have code that works both with the > latest stable and the latest beta (and/or the version in SMC). This is > something that should only happen at major version bumps, if ever. > > Of course, this is not easy to solve, but having a more modular > distribution (at least for some meaning of "modular") might help. > or it might make things worse, as the functionality becomes a function of a multitude of versions of different parts... But there is a way to make code work in Sage as upgrades happen - making it a part of Sage :-) Thus I don't buy this "future-proof" statement (well, of course, Sage may fold if sufficient number of right people get hit by a bus - but the same is true for Magma) > > -- > Luca > > -- 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.
