On Sep 23, 11:19 am, rjf <fate...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Sep 23, 5:36 am, Burcin Erocal <bur...@erocal.org> wrote: > > > I think it would be a huge overstatement to say that the symbolics > > subsystem in Sage was "designed" in any way. IMHO, it was mostly > > patched together to support educational use, then acquired more cruft > > through several rewrite attempts and cramped schedules. > > I think that is true of ALL the subsystems in Sage.
As we have tried to convince you before, this is very much NOT the case for large portions of Sage. In particular the sage-combinat and much of the algebraic geometry/number theory piece are definitely designed, certainly by this point. > In terms of my own interests, that is why the idea of rewriting Maxima > in > Python is pointless. But your interests are not quite the same as that of a practicing mathematician who would rather *use* math software than create the perfect one. And neither is that of the practicing neuroscientist, etc., who just wants easy access to something like our new Brian experimental package along with some other mathematics. That's fine, but not relevant in a normative sense. > Wouldn't you prefer to write a system that > addressed > the shortcomings of Macsyma (etc.) No. That would be a very good idea for someone whose research is directly related to those shortcomings. For most of those on this list, we would prefer to contribute to a system that has 1) Killer app in web-based interface 2) Has cutting-edge combinatorics and algebraic functionality 3) Has access to huge amounts of other libraries That could have been Maxima, no doubt! But for whatever reason its development went in other directions. That's fine. Maxima also wants everything 'in-house'; that's fine too; Sage prefers to use Python to glue other high-quality projects together with its (substantial) new code. I still don't know why you don't consider the truly new code in those areas to be interesting, but I suppose we all have the occupational hazard of overspecialization; I certainly do. > And by shortcomings I don't mean > "written in Lisp instead of Python". > Although this is a shortcoming in the sense that it is far more likely that someone who is not a computer scientist by training might actually be able to contribute, of course it isn't in the sense of how to write a high-level symbolic program. But that doesn't happen to be a goal of this project, though of course we are grateful to the GPL for allowing us to use the constantly improving symbolics in Maxima. And if anyone with Lisp knowledge ever reviews Nils Bruin's patch to make library access to Maxima the default, it will even be fast :) so we won't complain about that any more. But please don't make these blanket statements about the whole content of Sage until you are familiar with all those subsystems. As I've said before, and will likely say again :) Still, it's worth saying. All the best, - kcrisman -- 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
