On Jul 8, 9:06 am, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Since we're having this long thread comparing Sage to the Ma's,
> somebody might find this interesting:
>
> http://www.larssono.com/musings/matmatpy/index.html
>
> it's supposed to be a comparison of writing the same
> "numerical/scientific" code using Mathematica, Matlab, and Python.
It's a pretty stupid comparison. Imagine if you chose a Mathematica
program and then tried to make Matlab or Python do the same thing,
including simulating inappropriate data structures, different plotting
defaults, etc. And of course if any of the deeper Mathematica
symbolic routines were used, comparable Matlab or Python code might
take hundreds of pages.
Oddly enough, using the (now unavailable) commercial Macsyma, the code
might be quite simple. Assume the matlab code is in a file xxx.mat.
run the macsyma command
load("xxx.mat")
and it is translated from Matlab syntax to Macsyma, and loaded.
..............
On the other interesting matter in this thread, in which the issue is
raised about possibly offending people by taking their code and
rewriting it. I doubt that is the situation with any of the Maxima
authors, though I can see how that might happen.
Consider the situation in music:
"Joni Mitchell's drumbeats. Pink Floyd's piano chords. Bernard
Herrmann's Psycho score. These are the things a Beastie Boys song is
made of. In their two decades, MCA (Adam Yauch), Mike D (Michael
Diamond), and Adrock (Adam Horovitz) have proven themselves the most
inventive samplers in hip hop. From cramming 200 sonic snatches into
15 songs on 1989's Paul's Boutique, ...."
see http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.11/beastie.html
or google for lawsuits that have involved 4 chord progressions, or, I
think, even SINGLE chords.
Or imagine how Chanel or YSL or Gucci feel about knockoffs of their
handbags.
While these are presumably copyright issues with money at stack, it is
possible that plagiarism, even of something that is free, could be
hurtful. I don't know for sure how the original Mathematica authors
whose names have been stricken from the list (because they sued
Wolfram over royalties) feel about losing "credit" though at least
they got paid something.
Anyway, the idea that someone should rewrite Maxima (because it is not
written in Python?) is just so stunningly bad,
that it puts into question the design and implementation notions of
the people in charge of the project.
Of course if you are happy with a kind of "baby Maxima" that's OK.
But it means Sage is not a "viable alternative..."
to Maxima, even.
If the sympy people refuse to look at Maxima because it is under GPL,
then all they have to do is request their own copy from the Dept. of
Energy, and ask if they can use it under a BSD license, or anything
else. Which the DoE clearly would allow, if you read the letter of
transmission to Bill Schelter.
Actually, if they wrote a Lisp system in Python (most Lisp systems
have a small core written in C; that could be done in Python) then
they could claim DoE Maxima ran in Python (or "on top of" Python).
This would of course be a possible project for Sage-central, too.
Silly, but not as silly as rewriting Maxima in python ab initio.
RJF
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
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
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
