Hi, I was recently browsing SymPy's SVN repository (sympy-oldcore branch which contains the original implementation of SymPy) and I noticed that the first commit was created on 2006-08-01 02:03:30 +0200 (Tue, 01 Aug 2006), which means that today it's exactly five years since SymPy was started. Myself I joined the project at r903 (24 April 2007). SymPy started as a simple calculator with soon added uncanny capability for computing limits (due to implementation of Gruntz algorithm). Since then SymPy grown very quickly and become a reasonably sized project with 25 modules covering very many fields of mathematics and physics, with over 200k lines of code written by 145 developers from all around the world. One of it's modules, sympy.numerics, become an important project on its own (mpmath).
>From its beginning, SymPy was developed using the bazaar approach, with no central planning at all. Culmination of this approach was adoption of git for source code management and later GitHub for managing patches (via pull requests). Symbolic mathematics and computer algebra systems were usually developed in small coherent environments, for example within a group at a university. Development process of SymPy showed that this doesn't have to be the case, because SymPy isn't connected to any coherent group of people or any university or even country. Most SymPy developers didn't ever meet other in person. It's actually amazing that a project of this complexity can grow that fast despite this. A huge help was Google's Summer of Code program, which allowed us to hire many excellent students who have brought significant contributions to the project. Of course not everything is perfect. SymPy could be a little faster, better documented and allow for much easier embedding in other projects. I hope that in parallel to continuous growth of new features, like new solvers, new symbolic integration algorithms and other, we will also focus on those three issues. We made a little progress with documentation during SciPy conference, but this requires far more work and understanding from developers that documentation is as much important as code. SymPy already has a lot of cool features, but our users won't have a clue about this, until SymPy gets better documentation. How I see SymPy in 5 years? It's obvious that I would like to see SymPy feature complete, fast, well documented, etc. However, what I would like to see even more is SymPy being used by much more people in research and teaching. This is our task to not only develop the project but also to deploy it: show it to people, explain its strengths and describe the areas of application. I hope that next five years will be even more productive than the passing 5 years were. Mateusz -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sympy" group. To post to this group, send email to sympy@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sympy+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sympy?hl=en.
