ross k wrote:
David
(It sounded like you were a bit discouraged and I hope this doesnt
sound condescending but...)
No. I realise I am in a minority among Sage developers. I suspect my views might
be a bit less of a minority on sage-support. But even there, I expect they will.
You were right to query - I believe we should always think it is
legitimate to query how we might be able to do things be better.
Yes.
But now that we've had that discussion and its seems like things will
stay the same I want to suggest that right now this issue is far
overshadowed by so many other more important ones. Having being
surrounded by Matlab (and to a lesser extent Mathematica and Maple)
for about 15 years in a corporate environment, I have to admit am in
awe of the energy and rate of development of Sage since 2005. (Note -
Im comparing 15 years of the "commercials" development to 5 years of
Sage's)
I recently attended an in-house promotion of the latest "major"
release of Matlab and I cant tell you how underwhelmed I was over a
release that justified a major increment of their version number.
After mentally distilling their presentation to the bare bones, I
surmised that basically their "major" release had some very minor
improvements in functionality and some minor improvements in the GUI.
So version numbers are often a marketing tool.
Yes, version numbers can be a marketing tool. In fact, I do know of companies
that will purchase major updates, but not minor ones. So by making the version
number increment more, they get more sales.
It was clear there was a massive jump in functionality between Mathematica 5.2
and 6. The changes to 7 have been far less drastic, and perhaps a 6.1 would have
been more normal.
One of the main issues is the choice Sage made for its development
model. At first, it looked like the model represented the "building of
a Frankenstein" but on closer examination its more like we're
"collecting jewels" (the "best of breed" of open source that has the
right amount of functionality, often years of development into
precision specialist software, that wont take long to integrate and
looks like it has potential for us to develop it further).
Another cool point is: whatever success these jewels had outside of
Sage, now they have access to to all of Sages community for
development, documentation, bug finding and fixing (as Sage is
similarly and symbiotically connected to the Python community for the
development etc of some existing and future libraries)
So Sage will continue having these packages being integrated into it
(either by developers so they can participate in something big or
found by the Sage community) so theres no way commercial software can
keep up (regardless if they are ahead in market share at the moment -
"No-one every got fired for buying IBM" once apon a time but were are
they now?)
Forget "Viable alternative",
Well, that is a stated mission.
the reason why I feel these commercial
products should be shuddering in their boots is because of this
amazing and rare development model.
I'm not sure they are shuddering in their boots, but I think it is pretty clear
Wolfram Research see Sage as a threat.
I know there was this discussion before about the sponsored Google ads when one
search for Sage math. Personally I'm pretty convinced Wolfram Research have
decided to target Sage and pay for Google ads, though I know there are those
that argue that is not the case. (There's no need to discuss this one agan).
Dave
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