On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 9:16 AM, rjf<fate...@gmail.com> wrote: > > In terms of support, one major disadvantage of Sage, I think, is that > significant pieces of the implementation apparently consists of pieces > of code that are used as black boxes, and that the Sagemeisters > proudly disavow knowledge of. Thus a bug traced to Maxima is > unfixable "until we rewrite Maxima in python". > > This effectively vitiates any advantage that might be obtained by the > fact that these black boxes might be open source, or GPL, or portable.
There is precisely one component of Sage that has the above property, and that is Maxima. There are absolutely no other such components. Fortunately this won't be the case forever. I agree that having a component of Sage whose source code is visibly difficult for Sage developers to work with is a disadvantage of Sage, and one we should fix (by not using said component). It's hard to tell whether or not this is a disadvantage of Sage relative to the Ma's, which is what we're discussing. Perhaps closed source software also sometimes has major components that nobody currently at the component really understands and can modify/rewrite/fix. It's just that the closed source organizations can more easily keep this fact secret. -- William > > In terms of features, the idea expressed by Stan, that .... I > suppose that this > is not a fundamental disadvantage of Sage, as it is just a matter of > implementing better algorithms. .... > > pretty much misses the point. > > Implementing better algorithms can take enormous effort. One example > which I was looking at, in Mathematica, was the numerical (or > symbolic-numeric) integration program, which seems to include about > all the current algorithms merged in some way, including some > novelties, like variable precision arithmetic and symbolic analysis. > > You could try to duplicate that, but it would not be "just a matter > of ...." > > RJF > > > > > > > -- 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
