On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 2:34 AM, Roman Pearce <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Apr 29, 11:57 pm, "William Stein" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I'm giving a plenary talk at ISSAC in Linz, Austria this summer. I'm > supposed > > to write a 2-page "abstract/paper" for the proceedings. I just wrote > something: > > http://sage.math.washington.edu/home/was/tmp/abstract.pdf > > I think what you wrote is a pretty good introduction to what Sage is, > but it is a little long on the open source philosophy (which will turn > some people off) and it leaves out interesting details.
The "open source philosophy" is the entire reason for the existence of Sage. > The audience > will be very interested in why Sage might succeed, when previous open > source efforts have failed to attract the large audience of general > purpose users and developers. I suggest the following (some of which > you mentioned): > > 1) python is an easy and widely used high level language which is > particularly well suited for interfacing different programs > 2) collecting all the existing open source programs has allowed Sage > to quickly reach "critical mass", ie: it is very usable right now > 3) new and interesting things are being brought into Sage (JMol, user > interface improvements, etc) > 4) new mathematical algorithms and libraries are being developed for > Sage (FLINT, Linear algebra, rapid development with Cython, etc) > 5) researchers are using Sage right now (list contributors and areas, > and papers if possible) > 6) Sage is open source > Thanks, this is a great list. > I think if you start with the technical merits you can easily win over > the audience. These people have heard all kinds of sales pitches, and > open source looks like just another crusade. They are all uniformly > interested in computing things, and in software they can use for their > work. Sage has a very strong case on those grounds, please (I'm > begging you) stick to it :) You seem to be anti-open source in your own work, which is what *really* matters to you. It's my understanding that you've written a very interesting library in computer algebra and it is closed source. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I have the impression you generally don't see the value in *open source* mathematical software (per se), and are mainly interested in Sage only for the technically interesting successes it has had. > BTW, asking for contributors is the surest way to get zero > contributors. I'm really glad I didn't listen to you over the last three years. 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
