On 09/ 9/10 04:41 PM, Ben Edwards wrote:
I might shy away from any personal attacks on Stephen Wolfram, despite
controversy as him as a scientist. This should be about comparing sage
and Mathematica, not the people behind them.
I think that would be *very* wise.
I'm no fan of Steven Wolfram. IMHO he is a clever guy, who knows it, but has a
*HUGE* ego. I'm under-impressed with Wolfram's book "A new kind of science".
But ultimately, Mathematica is developed by a lot of people. Some of those
people are very good at their job. Some of you may know Daniel Lichtblau. I have
an incredible respect for Daniel. He clearly knows he stuff, is not full of
bull-shit and has been helpful solving Mathematica problems when it was clear I
was really trying to debug Sage issues.
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.math.symbolic/msg/bf17230f19d67698?hl=en
Daniel's comments were a lot more helpful than RJF's that is for sure!!
Your comparisons with Sage and Mathematica need to be on technical and economic
grounds - not what respect you may or may not have for Steven Wolfram.
Subjects I'd consider would be
* Ease of installation.
* Ease of use.
* Messing around with license servers in some cases with Mathematica.
* Support
* Reliability
* Cost
* Platforms supported.
* The fact Mathematica license limits you to 4 CPUs without extra cost.
* Openness of source code.
* What might happen if Wolfram Research go bust - not an impossibility, though
I certainly hope it never happens.
* What might happen if William leaves Sage - his blog indicates he is going to
concentrate on PSage, not Sage.
* The fact the main public support channel for Mathematica is moderated.
* Bug list for Mathematica hidden.
* If Wolfram Research find a bug, even if it means someone's results could be
inaccurate, they will not notify users.
One thing that is a natural advantage for me is the ability to not
only use all the packages included in sage, but any python package. I
find myself using sage to scrape, reconfigure and analyze large pieces
of data from a variety of sources. Python makes this easy. Because
there are so many python modules, it is very likely there is one that
does what I need. If not I can code it (usually relying on other
modules), and release it as its own module, building the number of
things that can be done quickly with python and sage. And as far as
scientific computation, if there isn't a python module that does what
I need (that is not included in sage) there is certainly an R package
that will.
Sage is not only good for mathematical research, but any scientific
and engineering research, just because of the huge number available
packages to use in python. I can't say I think the same is true with
mathematica.
Ben, you say Sage is good for scientific and engineering research, but I don't
see much evidence of Sage used in engineering research. Can you point me at
some? Engineering PhD theses, engineering papers? Engineering departments
teaching Sage?
Do a google search on these terms
* Mathematica engineering - 857,000 hits
* Sage engineering - 7,620,000 hit, but I could not find any that had
anything to do with the Sage maths project.
Also, note there are ways to access Python from Mathematica
http://library.wolfram.com/infocenter/MathSource/6622/
But there are also many Mathematica programs freely available. Wolfram Research
have a library.
http://library.wolfram.com/
I doubt it's as extensive as the Python libraries, but then a lot of the python
libraries are not related to science/engineering/maths.
Ben
I think to do Sage justice, you need to check some of your facts. I think people
will take your points more seriously if they are balanced.
Dave
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