On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 10:40 AM, William Stein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 6:22 AM, Harald Schilly > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > On Apr 10, 2:14 pm, mhampton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > > A link to 7zip.org right by the archive or in the install instructions > > > would help. > > > > will be there ... > > > > > > > but I'm not convinced that computer literacy of any depth > > > as increased ... > > > > Yes, especially because I think that's far more general. That computer > > literacy only increases, if there is some interest/force/reward to > > master the problems [e.g. nobody knows more about graphic cards + > > drivers than active gamers!], but this applies to all areas in life. > > Humans constantly optimize themselves and new things with a barrier > > are avoided, if there are other shorter path to accomplish the task. > > Even if in a long term period the initial higher investment would have > > the greater return of investment. So, emphasis should be in explaining > > why an open system with involvement of everybody is better than a > > closed up encapsulated for-profit one. Then the motivation is higher > > to master install instructions. > > But, disclaimer, that's just my private theory concerning the "dumb > > colorful point and click" vs. "complex and fast functionality" war ;) > > We should make Sage as easy or easier to install than > any of Mathematica, Maple, Matlab, or Magma. > I see no reason to compromise on this at all, since the > goal is to provide a viable alternative to Mathematica, > Maple, Matlab, and Magma. Part of this is that Sage must be > as easy to install as those programs. > > I don't think we should try to convince people > to install a difficult-to-install version of Sage because it will be better > for them in the long run. The right thing to do is to make Sage easier > to install. That's been my philosophy since I started Sage, and is > why Sage comes as a complete install, instead of something incomplete > with a huge number of dependencies. > > Until now the main goal has been growing the developer community, > so a lot of effort has gone into making Sage easy to install *for > developers*. I think Sage is in fact easier to install for developers > (i.e., to get a full developer environment setup) than most math > software projects. By this I mean that if one were to > become a Magma developer the barrier to getting everything setup > on your system to do development would I think > be higher than for Sage. > > Incidentally, here are last weeks download numbers on sagemath.org and > sage.math.washington.edu (2 of the download sites): > > Linux Binary: 81 > OS X Binary: 42 > Source: 76 > VMware: 95 > > TOTAL: 294
I agree with all this but really just want to pipe in one comment since by coincidence I looked at the download stats for sage.scipy. What was (to me) unusualy was the *huge* spike in downloads over the winder break last December). (Nearly a 10-fold increase.) I would be very interested in knowing if this 294 number increases around the end of next month, when the summer break starts for a lot of colleges. > > -- William > > > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
