It's possible to dismiss the result of the survey because of the low participation level, or to dismiss the results because of a hypothesis that the respondents already KNOW Sage and want to know something else.
But I suspect that there is also an underlying current of simple lack of interest in a tool that is perceived of as not particularly useful or relevant to numerical / scientific computing. Given its size and complexity and the irrelevance of most of its parts to the kinds of things that participants expect to need in their own work, they may be right. A skilled user of Matlab (or equivalent) can do a great many things. Showing that you get bad floating-point results numerically because of ill-conditioned problems, and that you can get more accurate results with exact or high-precision computing, is a selling point for people who realize that they have ill-conditioned problems (often this can be detected). But it is not much of a selling point for people who generally do not have ill-conditioned problems or fail to notice when this is the situation. And there are sometimes other ways of fixing up the problem so you don't need tools in Sage. There was an interesting off-hand comment earlier in this thread to the effect that someone thought that Mathematica would replace Matlab, seeing as how it (Mathematica) could growth to do everything Matlab- like. Maybe. Note that the late commercial Macsyma not only did Matlab-like things, it even had an alternative front-end syntax which was identical with Matlab. This did not save Macsyma Inc. But that might not be the key failure point. Getting back to the topic, it might be useful for Sage-ists to conduct a survey and understand what ARE the important features of Sage, keeping track of the backgrounds of the participants. What comes to mind is something like this who are you (e.g. engineer, cryptographer, stockbroker, quantum mechanic, string theorist, differential topologist) what features do you like in Sage what features would you like changed what features would you like added how much would you pay for those features to be added? (Assuming Sage is looking for sponsors!) I think it is pointless to conduct surveys unless you have some thoughts about reacting to them, so be careful what you ask! --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
