William Stein wrote: > > I 100% totally and absolutely agree with Tim Daly that computer > > algebra is at the handwaving stage. > > As a mathematician concerned with > > rigour, I am interested to know what SAGE hopes to do about it. > > Nothing. This is certainly not one of my goals of Sage; it's not > needed to create a viable alternative to the MA*'s, since they are also > at the handwaving stage.
I believe we can do a *lot* better than that. As I want to actually *use* SAGE for research, I need to know I can trust the output to a relatively high degree, just as I trust results from other people's papers. So, the upshot is that you can expect the parts of SAGE that I end up using to be pretty well tested - by me. The reason is simply that it is a lot less work to test SAGE properly and visually check the code than it is to develop it all over again myself. But be prepared for the onslaught! I also think that people from other projects who start to worry about the threat SAGE poses and read that comment are not going to sit back and let SAGE become a viable alternative. Especially the Magma group are going to think, OK, to make SAGE irrelevant, we need to do much better testing, formalise things better and write better documentation (oh and they should open source it as well, though there are other options they don't seem to have thought of). Magma is not a stationary target. To be a viable alternative, you need to aim ahead of them. Anyway, it proves Tim Daly's thesis that SAGE has done nothing new if we only aim to emulate roughly what has already been done by the Ma*'s. I'm not entirely sure I completely agree with that thesis, I do see new things in SAGE, but it does start to sound like he has a point. I also recall Roman Pearce recently getting upset about developers not wishing to do the hard work to tackle some of the big algorithms and just imagining that wrapping the right functionality in another package will deal with those. Off list he made the point to me that he doesn't even consider Magma worth competing with. He is thinking so far ahead of Magma that it is not even relevant to him. Getting within a factor of two of what Magma already does is not a worthy aim. As a general principle, that is a good way to think. We need to aim past Magma to become a viable alternative to them, and the big problems with Magma are bugs, documentation and closed codebase. They have speed for the most part and they have coverage. The main advantage we have at present is an open code base. Bill. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
