Em Qua, 2009-02-04 às 17:44 -0800, William Stein escreveu: > > 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.
That's right indeed. Most engineering schools around here use Matlab. Unfortunately what I see out there (or out here) is that usually the school tries to buy a license but the students tend to use pirated copies. I don't know if MathWorks uses the same strategy as Microsoft of letting some people pirate and getting people addicted so as to buy the software after leaving school. Actually, some specialties use Scilab too. I for one swim against the tide and use pylab with numpy. > > > > I think that the mass number of users comes from first-time calculus > > students. Around here students are not allowed to use software for calculus stuff. Maybe only for homework without the teacher's knowledge. Note: I can only say that about the undergraduate Engineering courses in my college. > > They have not seen Mathematica or Maple or Sage. To get them to be > > users, all > > you need to do is convince the calculus instructor to use Sage. Of > > course most of > > these students drop that program regardless. Engineering students may > > pick up > > Matlab in subsequent courses, since that is more likely to be used in > > practice. Or when the teacher forces to use Matlab, even if it's pirated. I've heard of a graduate student whose teacher didn't want to help him because he was using Scilab instead of Matlab. Cheers, Ronan --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
