William Stein wrote: > Perhaps I'm missing the point, but I'm taking this as a message to > focus in Sage more on the algebraic/symbolic side of mathematics > (e.g., Magma, Maple, Mathematica) rather than the numerical side, at > least for the time being. I don't have a problem with that > personally, since that is what I do best, and where most of my > personal interests are. > > My impression is that Enthought is the overall the leader in the > effort to create and distribute scientific computing tools using > Python. The founders of the company have a clear passion and love > for this, and seem from the outside at least to have simultaneously > done well for their clients and developer and user base, while walking > the tightrope of commercial versus open source. Part of that > balance has been for the most part drawing a line and *not* having GPL > or LGPL code in the core of their codebase. I do not in any think > that is "morally wrong" (I obviously prefer it to the situation with > my Microsoft neighbors). However, since Sage is a GPL'd project, this > has the natural corollary that almost no two-way technical interaction > is possible between the two projects. As result, the Sage project and > the Enthought/Python stack tend to compete for users rather than share > them, since they really are two different platforms (at least at some > layers, especially the GUI/graphics layers and distribution system). > > I think it's roughly reasonable to call the top 7 most popular topics > in your tutorial list basically "the Enthought scientific computing > stack". The bottom four are (L)GPL'd, one is Sage and another in > Sage. > > The best conclusion I can draw from all this is that for now at least > I'm going to focus on symbolic/algebraic computation, and let > Enthought continue to do a great job building the Python numerical > stack. If at some point users in the numerical Python community > really want what Sage has to offer, maybe they will do the extra work > to make Sage work for them. If not, they still have a great > Sage-compatible platform on which to build their work. No matter > what happens users win. > > Perhaps "numerical Python people" are the right people to make Sage > very numericaly Python friendly. The vast majority of Sage developers > are not "numerical Python people", and so maybe we have no clue what > should be done or how to make Sage what you guys want. I know very > well what number theory researcher mathematicians need out of Sage, > and I can't imagine that say Dag knows what number theory research > mathematicians need, nor should he, and even if I explained it in > detail, I wouldn't expect him to do the work of implementing it. > > The remaining people -- like Brian Granger, Ondrej Certik, etc., -- > are clearly already doing what numerical folks want wrt Sage, which is > to remove almost everything in Sage that is of interest to 95% of Sage > users/developers (groups, rings, fields, matrices, 2d and 3d plotting, > etc.)., and making a distribution (SPD) that satisfies precisely their > needs. > > I think I'm not uncomfortable with any of the above, unless of course > I'm totally wrong, in which case I would like to know why.
I think something important is missing from the picture: NumPy/SciPy isn't exactly a majority player either! In large parts of science and engineering the big M's (mostly MATLAB), Fortran and to some extent C++ are the only tools people have even heard of. (In my department few have even heard about Python.) Looking ahead, it might be that Mathematica is what is likely to supersede MATLAB, not any form of Python (according to one source of opinion -- I don't know much about this myself). Now SciPy, EPD, SPD etc. is great for people who know programming, and who want a better mix of software engineering and numerics/science packages. But, I don't see them ever becoming the simple, unified mathematical package which engineers could learn as their first tool in college. (And where 1/10 is by default something decent, yet numerics easily available...) I see in Sage (proper, not SPD!) the hope of something I really, really want, and which I think SciPy/Enthought/SPD isn't even trying to do. Obviously, the SciPy conference people are the selection of people who wants what the SciPy stack does though. The prime audience of a hypothetical numerics-boosted Sage are all of those who are likely unaware of the existance of Python in the first place, and those obviously haven't voted here (many of them don't even have the software skills to attend SciPy 09). All I can do though is ask you not to close the door for numerics if and when somebody steps up to lead the charge. Dag Sverre --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
