Hi Luca, On 2016-04-08, Luca De Feo <de...@lix.polytechnique.fr> wrote: > 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".
+1 I was seriously fed up when my research software was broken by backwards incompatible ostensibly "internal" changes --- repeatedly within one year---, which hempered my work on a funded project to the extent that I couldn't successfully finish. I considered quitting Sage for that reason. Mainly I didn't quit because in the *past* Sage used to be an ideal platform for my purposes, and while it was moving forward it didn't break too much of existing code --- thus, maintanance of my package and persistence of data was much less of a hastle than it has been in the past one or two years. Since it was OK till perhaps two years ago, I still hope Sage will be able to revive its strength. > 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. +1 > Of course, this is not easy to solve, but having a more modular > distribution (at least for some meaning of "modular") might help. -1. My impression was that what I perceive as "decay" of Sage was caused by changing Sage's development model. Changing the whole architecture would create even more of an overhead, or rather a swamp in which Sage would disappear. Sage should build the car and not re-invent the wheel --- and much less Sage should re-invent Sage. Best regards, Simon -- 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.
