On Sunday, April 10, 2016 at 8:48:24 AM UTC-7, Dima Pasechnik wrote: > > > (RJF) >> Finally, this message demonstrates a major defect in the idea behind Sage. >> That is, people involved in the project might find a problem, but they >> have >> insufficient expertise to do anything substantive about it. If there are >> bugs in Maxima, go learn about Maxima. Maybe fix it. >> > > yeah, and if a project finds a gcc bug, it must also fix it itself? > This clearly demonstrate a major defect in the idea behind almost > every project that uses gcc - every such project must have experts capable > of > fixing bugs in gcc... >
If there were bugs in gcc that affected your ability to get your work done you would have a bunch of choices. 1. Use another C compiler. 2. Change your code to avoid the gcc bug. 3. find the simplest instance of the bug and report it 4. look at the gcc code and fix it. Given the big deal made of open source etc etc, you are now saying that choice 4 is not possible because you must have experts. So somehow open source isn't so useful. In fact, some people who have been involved in the Maxima effort have done all the above, but with respect to Lisp. that is * multiple implementations of operating systems and multiple lisps; * conditionalization of source code to step around (mis)features of particular lisp systems/compilers * more-or-less careful bug isolation (i.e. people who report bugs are encouraged to find the smallest case) * yes, occasionally find fixes for lisp implementations. So I stay with my criticism of Sage -- you are always talking about python this-and-that, but the large bodies of code that (apparently) you depend upon and that (apparently) don't do exactly what you imagine they are supposed to do -- you profess ignorance of. Some time ago there was an effort to have some (high school?) students rewrite Maxima in python, the belief being that this would also either eliminate bugs, or make it possible for the next summer high school student to fix any bugs. And who knows, maybe sympy will eventually do all this. But not easily. And so one of the basic tenets of Sage -- that anyone can learn python and immediately become a significant contributor -- is not so clear. As for being offensive -- eh, I don't have enough time to make you feel good about yourself as well as pointing out problems. -- 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.
