On Sun, Apr 20, 2008 at 12:07 PM, mabshoff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > On Apr 20, 3:57 pm, "David Joyner" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > <SNIP> > > > > IMHO, I don't think removing lisp or maxima will happen anytime soon. Lots > of > > topics are open for discussion on the sage-devel list, and William > > Stein of course > > makes the final decision, > > David, > > you are wrong about William making the final decision. While William > is "Benevolent Dictator for Life" of the Sage project his opinion has > lost on technical grounds once. One of the reason I switched to the > Sage project is because things are decided on a technical level by the > community.
+1 I vote for my decisions not being final. Compelling technical arguments that convince people should be what decides things. > > > > but I've not heard any specific plans for > > that. On the other hand, > > I think a lot of people would be very happy if SymPy could, as if by > > magic, implement > > all the functionality of Maxima and Axiom overnight:-) > > That will not happen overnight, but as the Chinese proverb goes: > "Every long journey starts with the first step". As people around here > should know by now Sage time can be different than real time. And many > people besides me see the dependency for basic symbolic arithmetic on > Maxima+pexpect as bad since it kills performance. That has much more > to do initially with Pexpect than Maxima, but once you benchmark > Maxima (on gcl to be fair) against some other systems on arithmetic it > loses. Integration, differentiation, limits and so on are a different > story, but Maxima seems not to be a leader there, especially compared > with the commercial systems. And that is what Sage competes with at > the end of the day. Just to add to this the other "peformance" issue is how long it takes developers to implement new symbolic code that builds on the existing symbolic infrastructure in Sage. With Sage building everything on Maxima building such new code in nearly impossible. Serious problems problems have come up thrice in practice that I can recall regarding this: (1) Josh Kantor tried *very* hard to create a bunch of differential geometry code building on Maxima/Sage, but just couldn't, (2) Ondrej Certik had many issues trying to implement something (limits) using Sage's symbolic code, and (3) much like (1) Gary Furnish wants to do very fast multivariable differential geometry related to physics in Sage, but can't build it on the existing system. > > <SNIP> > > Cheers, > > Michael > > > > > -- William Stein Associate Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
