>
> Where does sage come into this discussion?
I guess they would like to be used instead of Octave, Matlab, Maxima, ... .
I think that the Sage project people have their own ambition to become the
centerpiece of mathematical computation, and underestimate the difficult of
reprogramming everything. They seem to be very heavy on abstract mathematics
and the systems that assist in various "applications" to pure math. Their
view of Maxima is somewhat jaded because they insist on using CLISP, even if
it is slow: they require (for no defensible reason, in my view) that they
can only use a lisp system that can be compiled by them on every targeted
machine. Thus Maxima is relatively slow.
Some people here and about are helping them by trying to compile Maxima with
ECL, instead of CLISP.
This appears to me to be a distraction.
Sage's goal appears to be to displace Maple, Mathematica, Magma, and Matlab,
all commercial systems. See
http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/
That page doesn't SAY that its goal is to displace Maxima or Octave or Axiom
or ....
It would be inconsistent with their philosophy to displace them because
those are already free, and thus there would not seem to be a reason to
displace them.
So instead the idea is to essentially eat them up or to cover them over with
a Python-scripted language of the SAGE project.
At that point it becomes a question of
http://www.amazon.com/Never-Anything-Bigger-Other-Drawings/dp/0911104674
SAGE has accumulated more momentum than some other projects, but it is still
young.
The world of scientific software is littered with noteworthy projects
defeated at some point. Will being free (speech, beer)
be the key that eluded so many others?
And since Axiom and Maxima and ... are already free, is there some extra key
that W. Stein and company have found that will make it all work?
Perhaps others can explain it better, but what I see as the proposed key: an
earlier internet-based-coordinated group of enthusiastic volunteers who know
python.
For further elaboration, see
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~fateman/papers/euromath-future.txt
which dates to 1996, and see if you see SAGE in it.
RJF