On Nov 19, 5:27 pm, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I think *everybody* should read that, so people understand precisely > what sort of ego-maniac self-aggrandizing opponent the Sage project is > up against. Mathematica is an opponent of Sage? Huh? Maybe you mean competition for Sage? WRI presumably has a clear notion of how many licenses for Mathematica have been sold. Some are for multiple users, so there is probably no way of saying how many users, exactly, there are. Millions? probably not. But outside of WRI, even the number of licenses is probably not known. As for Sage, one can tell how many downloads there have been. Again, some are for multiple users. But my recollection is that there are lots more people who appear to have downloaded Maxima than Sage. That doesn't count secondary distributions... The number of messages on Sage-support is not a good measure, I think. As I've pointed out, about 75% of them seem to involve Maxima. If you add to that the count of messages on the Maxima mailing list, is Maxima more popular than Sage? I think Maxima is more widely used than Sage, especially since every Sage installation includes Maxima but not vice versa. If you want to believe that Sage is, in some sense, catching up to Mathematica, you are entitled to your opinion. I think, however, if you actually study what is in Mathematica, its facilities and the additional facilities in recent versions, then you would be in a much better position to formulate an opinion as to relative "velocities". > > Also relevant > ishttp://blog.wolfram.com/2009/11/19/future-directions-of-wolframalpha/ > which lays out a vision of a future in which all mathematical-related > algorithms are implemented only in a closed webserver (Wolfram Alpha). > In which one person absolutely controls how everybody interprets and > thinks about mathematical computation. If you don't like Wolfram Alpha, you don't need to use it. It appears to be free, though not open source. Wolfram is not my favorite person either. So what? RJF -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
