> -----Original Message-----
> From: maxima-bounces at math.utexas.edu
> [mailto:maxima-bounces at math.utexas.edu] On Behalf Of Mike Hansen
>....,
> >
> > But the Sage philosophy seems to say "oh, these are all
> equivalent." But
> > none of them is acceptable because they are not VIABLE.
>
> I don't understand what you mean when you say "oh, these are
> all equivalent".
By which I mean Sage seems to approach the problem of providing an
alternative to applied mathematical general purpose computer algebra
programs this way: Maple, Mathematica, .... are in the same equivalence
class as
Maxima ... (? Axiom ?Singular Ginac?), and that therefore making a
package that includes
Maxima..., provides the necessary "alternative". That gluing such pieces
together
with python somehow solves the problem of finding some kind of equivalent
to Mathematica or to Maple. This simply is not a solution.
A way of making an alternative to Mathematica might be to add to Maxima
(say)
those features that Mathematica has that Maxima does not have. Not in
tarting-up the user interface to Maxima.
It may be closer to the truth that Matlab has an equivalent in octave,
scilab, euler...
but I don't see it in the symbolic systems.
......
>
> I would say a fair amount of the code in Sage has written for /
> motivated by research needs. I first got involved with the project
> after I had already written a fair amount of Python code for my own
> research. That is the motivation behind sage-combinat group:
> http://wiki.sagemath.org/combinat .
That's good if you are interested in algebraic combinatorics, but I wonder
if
you could quantify more precisely how much "a fair amount" means. For
example,
consider the lines of code in combinat. How does that compare to the
number
of lines of code in Maxima, or Maxima+ Lisp? or Singular or ....
RJF