On Apr 30, 2008, at 4:50 PM, root wrote:
> But we've already had this discussion and it is clear that I'm > completely out-in-the-weeds, talking-nonsense, and obviously have > no idea how REAL-open-source-projects are done. So lets just leave > it where it left off before, which is that I've simply dropped the > attempt to give the benefit of experience. Hi Tim, I've been vaguely following your posts to this list over the last few weeks. I don't think you're talking nonsense, but I don't completely understand what point you are trying to make. You seem to be making the following argument, correct me if I'm wrong. You claim that the documentation of the implementations of algorithms in Sage is not good enough, in the sense that someone looking at the Sage codebase in a few years won't be able to understand what is going on. You conclude that Sage will die. The implication is that the way to fix things is for us to improve the documentation of these implementations (perhaps via literate programming or whatever), so that Sage will be more likely to succeed. But isn't the core problem simply one of limited resources? We all have limited time (fields-medallists and non-fields-medallists alike), and so there is some tradeoff between getting something to work as quickly as possible (and hence is useful NOW) and making a beautiful product which meets higher standard of scholarship (and hence is more useful LATER). I can't see any way around this tradeoff. The only thing I can see that will stop a project like Sage from dying is to keep building a steady inflow of users and contributors, so that the knowledge you refer to remains as alive as possible. david --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
