On May 1, 1:06 am, root <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Hi Tim,
> I WANT Sage to live. I want it to succeed. I want it to be the > lingua-franca of the business so that we can all post our results > "in Sage" at conferences. I want to be able to "drag and drop" > your publication onto my system and have your code "just work", > your documentation "just connect". I want to be able to not only > use what you write, but to understand it so I can use it effectively. > I want MMA and Maple users to "write for Sage" instead. > > My problem is that I don't see the fundamental difference between > Sage and any other system that I've touched in the past. I think in Open Source it is difficult to tell what makes a project succeed and what makes it fail. If you look way back and consider the *BSD kernel, the Hurd and the Linux kernel it was unclear which kernel would "win" in the end. I think it came to a surprise of many people and onlookers that the seemingly sucky Linux kernel made the race and not the more established and well proven BSD kernel or the "revolutionary" Hurd. In my opinion it boiled down to leadership and Linus made all the difference for the Linux kernel. I think Sage is what it is today because William made it that way. The big difference seems to be that contributing to Sage is significantly easier than to other open source math projects and at some point you get over the hump and are in a positive feedback cycle. To me Sage clearly has reached that point. Will it be there forever or even live twenty years from now? Maybe, mabye not, it all depends on how the Sage community develops. I think that software has a life cycle and that mathematical software is no different. > And I don't > want this whole generation of mathematicians to "do it all over again" > without some fundamental gain. Many components of Sage live independently of it and if the Math community in general wants to keep writing Open Source software life will go on. Is it wasteful and wouldn't it be better if only one or two strong implementations in any given area of mathematics would exist? Maybe, but I think in the end duplicate development effort is something we have to live with and competition is good for business. Other projects that are very much like Sage have been attempted, some of them on top of proprietary systems which were doomed to fail IMHO, and others that eventually died. I don't really think Magnus had the same broad approach as Sage does, but there certainly was the same design principal, i.e. using components and glue them together somehow. > I may be wrong that the literate > documentation is the key. And I admit I'm a knuth-boy fanatic about it. You are not giving any secrets away here ;) > My question is, what can you suggest that will make it live when others > have not? What would the alternative be? I don't see anything fundamentally broken with the current development model of mathematical software. If you are on the right track Axiom will be there in 30+ years while Sage might have gone the way of the Dodo. > Tim Cheers, Michael Cheers, Michael --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
