On 9/18/07, Ted Kosan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > This is a basic mathematics/CS divide. Mathematicians will expect
> > their vectors of length n to have indices 1..n and similarly for
> > matrices and so on. The packages pari and magma use that convention
> > accordinly, since they are written for mathematicians to be as close
> > to mathematical notation as possible, and this is a great help to
> > getting mathematicians to do computations.
> >
> > I think there's a real problem if we tell mathematicians tat to use
> > SAGE properly they have to both learn programming in a language they
> > have probably never heard of (sorry, but that is the case with pyhton
> > and mathematicians) and also re-learn habits of a lifetime. There is
> > a very steep learning curve involved in learning a new package in any
> > case -- it took me years to get a "feel for" magma, and I still don't
> > have a good one for SAGE -- and it does not take a lot to put people
> > off.
> >
> > Sorry if this sounds negative, but I have a feeling that sage-devel
> > has more CS people in it than mathematicians!
>
> What is Sage's target market? It seems to me that determining an
> answer to this question should be a high priority item :-)
That's an interesting question that I've thought about...
Sage is free software produced mostly by volunteer work.
There is currently not a single person who is paid fulltime
to work on Sage. The current goal with Sage is not to maximize
profit, and as such, the phrase "target market" is likely have a
different meaning for Sage than for Maple (say), and hence the
answer is likely to be different.
I see the primary goal of the Sage project is the following:
"Provide a free open source viable alternative to
Magma, Maple, Mathematica, and MATLAB."
(For me personally the goal is a viable alternative to Magma, since
Maple, Mathematica, and Matlab are all useless
in my research area, since nobody in my area of
number theory do not use those systems for serious
research -- everybody uses Magma or PARI.)
Back to your original question. Because of the above goal,
the target audience for Sage is in fact pretty similar to the
ones for Magma, Maple, Mathematica, and MATLAB. However,
the emphasis is much different, and because Sage is a rapidly
changing project, the meaning of "target audience"
changes over time.
I see the target audience for Sage today, in order of priority as:
(1) People who can contribute back and would otherwise be likely
to use Magma,
(2) People who can contribute back and would otherwise be likely
to use Maple/Mathematica,
(3) People who would use Magma and not contribute back,
(4) Maple/Mathematica users who would not contribute back, and
(5) Matlab users who would not contribute back.
That said, I view all of these groups as very important.
This priority list will change as Sage becomes more feature complete
and more bugs are fixed. Also, perhaps the above priority list would
nearly reverse if Sage were to have either a commercial counterpart (think
Redhat who sell support for Linux) or a generous financial benefactor
(think Mark Shuttleworth who sponsors Ubuntu using his dot-com millions).
Things are much different when people actually get paid
to work on a project (e.g., the 2d mathematica-like graphics
in Sage were written last year by Alex Clemesha, who I
employed full time to work on Sage as a normal job. That was
an improvement to Sage aimed very much at group (4) above.)
Comments are very welcome!
William
--
William Stein
Associate Professor of Mathematics
University of Washington
http://wstein.org
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