> > My perspective is partly coming as someone who has several papers that >> rely heavily on Sage computations. I've archived the code and data in a >> permanent fashion, but every backwards incompatible change Sage makes >> decreases the odds that anyone will be able to easily verify or extend my >> work five years from now. >> > > one needs to maintain the code, one can't just hope it will all magically > keep working in newer versions (it won't be true even if it was in plain > Python). > > And in this case a fix is trivial. (and you have a chance to check along > the way that it is still working) >
Yes, I am all too well-aware that all code requires some level of maintenance. The question is how often and how much, and I don't think the fact that maintenance is inevitable is a good argument for increasing the amount required unnecessarily. Especially in the context of software used by mathematical researchers. Enough trivial changes add up to something nontrivial, and my main point is that for a lot of Sage users, something like this is not trivial and has the potential to turn mathematicians away from Sage to one of the "M" tools that are likely more stable (I'm not sure about that, I of course avoid the M's when at all possible ;-). Nathan -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sage-devel/d714fefb-8925-4350-9422-0ebe1fb6ceccn%40googlegroups.com.
