There's a lovely little article in the February 2009 issue
of the monthly on using integrals to approximate pi. The
author "discovers" some nice rational approximations of pi
by systmeatically searching through integrals of the
form
integrate(
(x^m * (1 - x)^n * (a + b*x + c*x^2))/(1 + x^2),
x, 0, 1)
with Maple. Unfortunately, Maxima (and therefore Sage)
cannot do these integrals. Does the author's use of Maple
in any way diminish his results? Any one of the particular
results is easy to verify once you've got the answer, by
the way.
Now, I know for a fact that there are some things that Sage
does better than Mathematica, but the reverse is also true.
Should I toss Mathematica out the window, since I can't read
its source? What do I do with my 20 years of experience
with Mathematica?
Many people on this list play two interesting roles:
* Proponent of open source software
* Developer of open source software
I think these roles might be sometimes at odds. In your
role of Proponent, you might enthusiastically extoll the
ability to read code (and I do admire this, by the way). As
Developers, however, you don't want to alienate the many
potential users who are not necessarily programmers. I don't
think they necessarily need to feel bad about the fact that
they can't read source code when there are perfectly
legitimate other ways to check or verify answers.
Incidentally, I was really not trying to enter into a debate
on this. On the contrary, my views are probably closer to
the open source philosophy than Wolfram's "Why You Do Not
Usually Need to Know about Internals" philosophy. That's
just not where my skill set is.
Mark
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
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
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
