On Feb 13, 2009, at 10:47 AM, William Stein wrote:
>> > > Here are some things that the Ma*'s tend to do, which sometimes > academic math software projects don't: > > * listening to what users want > That's really not entirely true. A simple example is that I know many people who would like better LaTeX export for Maple, but Maplesoft has explicitly told me that they have no desire to fix it. Instead, they want people to use their document mode, despite the fact that one can't submit Maple to a journal. So, I wrote some code that applies regular expressions to the LaTeX output to clean it up. Also, they have different Vectors that are not interchangeable (VectorCalculus and LinearAlgebra) but yet, they haven't fixed that. > * solving problems in practice that users care about, even if they > are hard > Yes and no. They care about selling licenses, so if they think they can add something that will help sell licenses, then they might consider it. It seems like at least Maplesoft is more interested in add-on products than improving Maple at least lately. > In Sage development, we can and should continue to do the same. I certainly agree with this assessment. However, everyone has their own specialities and interests and it's difficult to get people to work outside that. For instance, working on integration and limits to move away from Maxima. Talking about Sage with people, I get back the opinions that Sage might make a replacement for Magma since that's the interest that many of the Sage developers have, but it's unlikely to be a replacement for Maple/Mathematica since the symbolic calculus isn't of interest to Sage developers. I'd certainly like for this to be proven wrong. Cheers, Tim. --- Tim Lahey PhD Candidate, Systems Design Engineering University of Waterloo http://www.linkedin.com/in/timlahey --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
