-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hi,
In response to Harald's and Michael's (very enlightening!) posts, I want to say a few words about educational use of Sage, from a slightly different point of view. I'm teaching mathematics at Colby College, a four-year liberal arts undergraduate-only institution. It is small (1800 students) and most of the students can definitely afford to buy whatever software they feel like or think they need. So far, my efforts of getting them exposed to Sage have been limited to showing them live in-class examples of graphing and computations in the notebook, and setting up a worksheet in which they could play with Taylor series, again via the notebook running on my desktop computer. In the spring I will teach differential equations, and I want to make much more extensive use of Sage, and get the students to use it as well. For this I will have to run a notebook on my computer for the whole semester and have them use it remotely. Why is this the only option? For one thing, the mathematics department does not have a computer lab, and there are very few college-wide labs. I do not have the authority to install software on these, and our IT services do not support Linux. Most students have their own laptops, but they of course do not run Linux either. Since there is no institutional support for it, I can only *encourage* them to install Linux; if I require it, I automatically become the Linux support person, and I do have better things to do. The upshot is that these students will only use Sage remotely via the notebook and most of them will not install it locally, which means that they will not become part of the community (and contribute!) So even though I have not used Windows in more than 10 years, I am in favor of making it easier for Windows users to install, run, play with, break, fix, and help out with Sage, and I do not think that time spent on porting Sage to Windows is wasted. Increasing the number of serious users, even if they're Windows-bound, means having more people who can test code, write documentation, come up with nice examples and pretty screenshots, and all the other things that we agree are desirable. If we keep relying on the developers to do all this stuff, they'll have no time for implementing new features and debugging the existing ones. Alex -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.7 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFHa/RidZTaNFFPILgRAkUaAKCSXs2RMSE/GomagjoU4y71/9utRQCggieU EzVdT+awA80jxP/Y6L67/6I= =jpNN -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
