On Feb 4, 4:02 pm, ross k <ros...@gmail.com> wrote: > I recently attended an in-house promotion of the latest "major" > release of Matlab and I cant tell you how underwhelmed I was ...
That sounds extremely boring. I think matlab's success is that they started very early and listened closely what the users needed - something to manipulate matrices easily, not directly the lapack&co. stuff. Also, universities and industry had money to finance them and collaborative software development across the world wasn't possible - it's now easy because the internet has gotten so fast and there are good tools for that. In the meantime, matlab was just consistent to their wrong design decisions and subtle "differences" to other systems. That's why it will still stick around for a long time ... > At first, it looked like the model represented the "building of > a Frankenstein" but on closer examination its more like we're > "collecting jewels"... That's a good picture, thanks! I have the feeling I'll reuse that phrase somewhere -> sage-marketing ;) > 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 ... Sage acts like a catalyst in chemistry. It widens the audience of small software packages (although indirectly) and those who are interested why sage can do this and that or want to improve something, they find out about them and get engaged with the specific communities or just via a simple upstream bug report. It's a linear relationship between the number of downloads ~ number of users ~ number of developers. ...and to come back on topic: looking back, i think the best version number for Sage were the release dates (back in the early 0.x time). Today, a "YYYY-MM" string would be nice (adding a .1 if there is a second release in the same month). H -- 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
