Mike Hansen wrote:
Hi rjf,
>> Sounds good, so why am I queasy?
>>
>> There are, in my opinion, other open source alternatives [VOSA] (Maxima,
>> Axiom, XCAS, Octave ...) that could be substituted for Sage in the sentence
>> above.
>>
>> What William Stein may be saying (or rather not saying) is that yes, there
>> are all these other programs that you can download free and run as
>> alternatives to the named programs, but we won't mention them since they
>> are, in terms of our philosophy not VIABLE!
>>
>> Eh? By the SAGE DEFINITION a system is NOT VIABLE if you cannot compile all
>> the components from scratch on your computer with free software. Even if you
>> can do it, the system STILL MAY NOT BE VIABLE if there is someone else who
>> can't compile it from scratch on one of HIS computers.
>>
>
> With respect to the Sage "mission statement", I don't think anyone
> associated with the project uses that in their definition of
> viability. I see being able to compile from source as more of a
> pragmatic stance for our project since it reduces the dependencies on
> binaries provided by others. It also makes it easier to port Sage to
> new systems / architectures.
>
>
Yep, the reason Sage has some many contributors is that Sage developers
have made so incredibly easy for people to start working on the code
without having to worry to install numerous components from sources or
their distributions. The above argument you make is so dumb it isn't
even worth rebutting point by point. You either are pretending to be
dumb and extrapolating things William wrote about Sage specifically to
become general definitions (VIABLE) or you are really living in a world
that twisted and actually believe what you wrote. Either way, you would
make a world class troll on slashdot either way. You do not seem to
understand that the developers are usually users first and if you make
building a piece of software non-trivial many people who could
contribute do not because they failed to even get to the point where
they could start to contribute.
>> Now there are many people who have compared
>> Maxima/Axiom/XCAS/Maple/Mathematica/Matlab and found one or the other to be
>> lacking in various respects. This ranges from "uses different syntax" to
>> "doesn't know enough about ODEs" or "factors integers too slowly" or
>> "doesn't know enough statistics" or "plots don't rotate in real time" etc.
>>
>> 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".
>
>
Well, Sage is assembled out of about 80 components where a couple dozen
are mathematical packages or libraries with the rest needed to achieve
goals like networking infrastructure. So if you pick Maxima/Axiom/XCAS
and Octave and argue that Sage is trying to reimplement their
functionality in Python (you standing on the toes of giants comment)
you need to take a close look and understand that we do not do that,
i.e. much of the Matlab functionality is provided by numpy/scipy which
is a project on its own that provides interfaces to many if not all of
the numerical libraries that Matlab provides.
>> So Sage staff (volunteer or paid) must work on them to make one of them
>> viable, e.g. strain to make one compilable on every computer.
>>
>> * Instead of finding a remedy to some bug in Maxima or Axiom, or add
>> features that provide value beyond that available in Maple or Mathematica,
>> or Magma or Matlab, staff will be devoted to fulfilling an essentially
>> political statement about free speech.
>>
>> Aside: This generalization is somewhat unfair regarding Sage in some domains
>> because of the interests of the main investigator, since he and/or his
>> collaborators are actually interested in some scientific questions: finding
>> or designing alternatives (e.g. for number theory) that are fast. That's OK,
>>
Guess what: number theory is incredible demanding on linear algebra,
polynomial arithmetic and many more basic building blocks of a CAS. So a
CAS well suited for number theory is likely to be well suited for many
other applications.
>> and probably constitutes a research agenda of a more or less traditional
>> form. William Stein says--
>> "Most importantly, Sage-3.0 finally has code for computing with modular
>> abelian varieties. You almost certainly have no clue what those are, but
>> suffice to say that I started the Sage project to compute with them, so
>> having this code in Sage is a major milestone for me and the project."
>> Anyway this fast algebra stuff is (probably) not based on some wobbly
>> political consideration.
>>
>
> 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 .
>
>
Well, I have the feeling you don't get it and you never will. Lisp is
not the center of the computer science world, it never has been in the
past despite what the lisp crowd believed in and it certainly seems
rather unlikely it will make a huge comeback to become more main stream
again. And despite your cheerleading and looking at the world via lisp
colored glasses you ought to check out what the kids are doing these
days. You do remind me a lot of some old man sitting on the porch
telling the kids to get of his lawn.
You have written many papers about CAS systems and you can conjecture
all you want for what I care, but I cannot escape the thought that you
are very much in the position of Tannenbaum arguing with Linus that
Microkernels are the future. I am sure you know how that discussion
turned out and just because you write some article and get it published
in some journal does not mean that it will happen that way. In the CS
world the Microkernel fraction "won" the argument because all the people
who did the coding didn't have time to write articles for peer-reviewed
journals and instead went off to do the grunt work, which is precisely
where I am heading now since I got work to do.
> --Mike
>
Please don't reply to me off list if you so desire since my reply will
be on list again anyway.
Cheers,
Michael
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