On Sat, 10 Jan 2009 at 12:13PM -0500, Luiz Felipe Martins wrote: > Believe me, going to Sage has been (and will continue to be) a major > time investment. Faculty coming to Sage will weigh their disillusion > with other software against the investment needed to change. I > actually pondered about it for the whole fall semester, before "taking > the plunge". People will have to be convinced of two things: > 1) It works better than current commercial software. > 2) Even if the transition is not easy, it is worth the effort.
Ironically, one thing that makes the time investment valuable is that Sage costs nothing to acquire. In graduate school, I made an enormous time investment into CAS X and became very proficient with it. Then I came to my current institution, which uses CAS Y, and discovered that all my time investment into X was worthless. (Actually, it's worse than that: here, they use use an outdated version of Y and aren't interested in updating. So when I searched the web trying to learn about Y, I kept running into unhelpful information about the newest version, which made learning the older version even more difficult.) With Sage, this issue is moot. Anywhere I go, I can use Sage. If I write Sage code, any colleague can get Sage and run it. These things contribute to making the time investment in learning Sage valuable, and are things that the four M's don't have. Dan -- --- Dan Drake <dr...@kaist.edu> ----- KAIST Department of Mathematical Sciences ------- http://mathsci.kaist.ac.kr/~drake
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