mabshoff wrote:
> > Since Sage takes inspiration from Mathematica in so many other areas,
> > my thought is that using mathlink as a starting point for what a Sage
> > API should look like would make sense too.
>
> I think that API is just ludicrously heavy and way to complicated.
> Sage development has always been guided by KISS and the above diagram
> is far from that ideal.
I see webMathematica being used all over the web so to me the
Mathematica API appears to be performing its job beautifully :-)
> Well, in the end there ought to be only one distribution - there is no
> point in forking the codebase.
How can code that only talks to Sage through an API be used to fork Sage?
> In the very end I need to quote Linus: Talk is cheap, show me the
> code. As long as this is all planning and hand waving I see little
> benefit from having this discussion.
But Michael, I *have* submitted code, quite a bit of it...
I started participating in Sage about a year ago and at that time I
prioritized the list of areas I could contribute in. At the top of
the list was Sage's documentation because it was a mess (actually it
still is, you guys *really* need to fix that) and that is when I began
work on the Newbies book. As the Newbies book started to become
useful, I decided to experiment with having an external language
communicate with the Sage computation engine and I devoted a
significant amount of effort into creating SAGEIDE:
http://sage.math.washington.edu/home/tkosan/sageide/
I was very excited when I actually got it to work but when I posted it
for evaluation, only one developer bothered to look at it.
"Wow", I thought, "tha's strange, the Sage developers are usually so
eager to evaluate new Sage-related things people make. Maybe I am
just too new to Sage and need to prove myself more."
Time passed and I saw that people were really wanting Sage to have 3D
capabilities, but the "Java3D in the browser" approach was not working
too well (I told people that using Java3D in the browser was a bad
idea, but nobody listened). So I put a bunch more effort into adding
Java3D to SAGEIDE and it worked beautifully! However, when I posted
it for people to look at, there was still almost no response...
Then I talked myself into thinking that Sage developers only got
excited about code that was either added to the Sage computation
engine or to the notebook (despite the fact that they had no problems
looking at all kinds of python and AJAX-based applications that people
would periodically find on the Net). "Okay", I thought, "I'm
flexible, I'll adapt." I didn't have the mathematics background to
contribute code to the computation engine (I still don't) so I started
studying the notebook code (which was extremely painful, BTW, because
it has almost no documentation).
My first step was to get my mind around python better, learn
JavaScript from scratch, and start digging into the notebook code. I
decided that my first contribution to the notebook would be to figure
out a good way to allow Java applets to communicate with both the
client and server part of it. Yet again, I was very excited when I
got it working and by this time I had even learned enough to create a
spkg and a trac ticket for it:
http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/1510
I thought that surely by now I had paid enough dues to merit some
attention from the core Sage developers (especially after volunteering
to create the JMOL-src package on short notice over Christmas because
it was needed ASAP. Robert will confirm that this was not a trivial
task).
But not one of you guys has bothered to look at the work I did, even
after repeated requests to do so since it was submitted over 2 months
ago...
By this time I could not hide from the fact that the reason you guys
were not looking at my submissions was because they were all written
in *Java*. This became amply clear in the Wiris email.
Show you the code? I've been trying to show you code for months now,
but I can't force you to look at it :-)
> As you mentioned yourself there
> is plenty of work in trac to do. So far nobody else has jumped in on
> your side and volunteer his or her free time and energy to make things
> happen.
Do you think that I was the only person who noticed the way I was
being treated by you guys? Did it ever occur to you that a
significant number of the people on "my side" learned to use Sage by
reading the Newbies book and thought "if Ted gets treated this way
when he tries to make a contribution, how are they going to treat me?"
Also, it is kind of strange to complain that people don't jump in and
help work through the trac tickets while at the same time expending
almost no effort to write good documentation which clearly explains
Sage's architecture, theory of operation, code organization system,
etc. You guys keep promising to come through with stuff like this,
but it never happens. The way things are now people are forced to
needlessly waste much of their limited time and energy just trying to
understand these fundamental things :-)
Switching to everyone now...
The reason I decided to join the Sage project was because I thought
Sage could be an excellent way for students to learn mathematics. Its
not my fault that the number of students and teachers using Java
applet-based mathematics software in the world completely dwarfs the
user base of any other mathematics software (a fact that seems to
elude most of you). These teachers and students *love* Java because
of how it has enriched their lives and it seemed obvious to me that
the best way to reach out to these users was to take the software they
already loved and make it even better with Sage.
I can see now that this is not going to happen for the simple fact
that too many of the core Sage developers have an unreasonable dislike
for Java. What you guys don't seem to realize, however, is that all
of the negative posts you have made about Java over the past year have
effectively given Sage the "kiss of death" as far as its use in high
school and early college education is concerned.
Java applets dominate the educational mathematics software space and
the developers who created these applets own this space. Over time
these developers will probably learn about Sage and come take a look
at it because it has capabilities they don't currently have. But the
first thing they are going to do when they get here is to search for
the word "Java" in the email lists (I did), read all of the silly (and
often mean) things you guys have said about Java over the past year,
leave, and then tell all of their developer friends and users to avoid
Sage.
The same thing will also happen if any Java-centric company comes to
take a peek at Sage (such as Sun, IBM, etc.) or companies which have a
bunch of Java developers (like Google:
http://www.google.com/support/jobs/bin/search.py?lr=lang_en&type=f&query=java&Action.Search=Search)
Anyway...
I am going to take some time off from Sage and go help out the
GeoGebra community for a while. The 100,000 users they have over
there that need support is a pull that is too strong for me to resist
at this point :-)
There is no need to respond to this email because I will also be
unsubscribing from sage-devel and sage-support for a while too.
Over time the Newbies book will become out of sync with Sage and so
someone will either need to maintain it or remove it.
On a lighter note, I don't have any hard feelings for anyone here. In
a recent email to David Joyner I indicated that the Sage development
team was amazing and I still hold that view :-)
Ted
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