On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 8:02 AM, Tim Lahey <tim.la...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > 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 case nobody noticed, I'm not exactly a big fan of the Ma*'s. But for whatever reason -- perhaps their purely selfish desire to make money -- they do often try to listen to users and solve problems, instead of making excuses like some posters in this thread. >> 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. Let me just remind you that the goal of the Sage project is: Create a viable open source free alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica, and MATLAB. I think nearly everyone who works on Sage is aware of and contributes toward this goal. You are a Sage developer and you are a counterexample to the statement "symbolic calculus isn't of interest to Sage developers". There are I bet dozens of other Sage developers who I could add to that list, including myself, Burcin Erocal, Jason Grout, Mike Hansen and many others. -- William -- William Stein Associate Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
