On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 9:54 PM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <zzn...@gmail.com> wrote: > > William Stein wrote: >> On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 4:59 PM, rjf <fate...@gmail.com> wrote: >>> You are of course welcome to believe this, but the major competition >>> for Mathematica >>> is probably not Sage, but Matlab. >> >> For many engineering applications Matlab blows Mathematica out of the >> water, and I wouldn't even consider Mathematica competition. For >> many applications in pure mathematics -- hobbyists, education, >> research, combinatorics, number theory, etc. -- I think that >> Mathematica is vastly better than Matlab. Apples and Oranges. > > Isn't Matlab, like the open source Octave, SciLab and FreeMat > "knock-offs", a "purely numeric" langauge? They're great tools for easy > interactive computing, but do they do *symbolic* calculation?
Not directly. Matlab did *purchase* MuPAD fairly recently, and they sell MuPAD as a "Symbolic Toolbox" addon. I used to use the Mupad <---> Matlab symbolic toolbox thing a decade ago for a job I had once. But core Matlab is very much numerically oriented. > I have never used any of them. I do most of my numeric work in R and > have for many years. As an aside, there is a package in the R CRAN > repository that interfaces with the open source symbolic math package Yacas. > > >> In the US academic education environment I think your statement above >> agrees 100% with what I've seen. >> However, I expect that is not the environment Michael is talking about >> or that the new Mathematica $300 "Home Version" license is aimed at. > > I'm not familiar with that version. Is that the "branding" -- a "home > version" of Mathematica? Personally, as a working applied mathematician, > I have not actually bought a licensed symbolic math tool since Derive 6, > which was clocking in at a list price of $200US IIRC when TI stopped > selling it. When I need symbolic capabilities now, I use wxMaxima most > of the time, which has a "Derive-like" UI and has the stuff I care > about, like Laplace transforms, built in. But clearly Sage, which > includes R, is going to be my platform of choice once I learn how to use it. What are some ideas you have about how we could make Sage easier for _you_ (and people "like you") to learn? How did you learn R? William --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
