On Jun 20, 2009, at 3:08 AM, Pierre wrote: >> Of course, there are a lot of different pieces of software in the >> background. One strength of Sage is that it provides a uniform way of >> communicating with all these pieces of software, namely via Python/ >> Cython. This is like a good travel agent: You say that you want to go >> from London to Liverpool, and the travel agent gives you the cheapest >> or fastest or most comfortable connection: You don't need to worry >> that there are various train companies in the background. (Also you >> don't need to go via Paris if you want to travel from Strasbourg to >> Calais -- sorry, I couldn't resist to mention a detail that I found >> odd when traveling in France :) > > that's about what i told him. Mind you the "traveling" metaphor is > quite apt : indeed a good travel agency will get you all the tickets > for different rides with different companies, but what if one train is > late ? of course the next train, operated by another company, is not > going to wait. (Been to england anyone ?) Then suddenly you have to > worry about companies. That sort of thing can happen with sage : when > one functionality isn't perfect yet, you can usually get around it by > knowing that there are several ways of doing things, several pieces of > software at work. Which means all needs to be perfect if we want to > avoid the criticism... well, none of this is too serious of course, > and i'll take care of that colleague personally! but i thought it was > interesting to point out somebody's first impression on sage, albeit a > curious one.
That is a very interesting first impression. For the most part, Sage seamlessly uses the many components underneath, and things are moving even more in this direction. Numerics, however, is one area where there is already a vibrant community around the SciPy/NumPy way of doing things, so exposing (rather than completely wrapping) lots of NumPy does have value. - Robert --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-support@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-support-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-support URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
