On 2 April 2011 14:20, Bill Hart <goodwillh...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> Please also bear in mind that many "upstream" developers have put > years of their life into research, development of algorithms and > coding. Many of them are professional mathematicians, not computer > scientists or professional programmers. They live and die by theorems, > grants, teaching, publications, etc., not language standards and may > only care if their code works for them and their immediate friends! > They very often do not have time to maintain it to the high standard > they might prefer, and their donation of their code is made on that > understanding. Fair enough, but I would hope the quality control in Sage would prevent poor code being merged in the first place. That does not seem to have been so, though I think the situation is improving somewhat. I would not expect to see code written by pilots controlling aircraft or code written by medical staff controlling medical equipment. OK, these are extreme cases, but happen to be two industries I have worked in (aeronautical and medical), though I have never had to write safety-critical software for either industry. > There's a fine line between critiquing/refereeing/improving code and > ridiculing it. Very true, but the fact it is in Sage, does cause frustration. I suspect it was frustration which was the provocation for the initial rather harsh comments on this thread. There are bits of code in Sage, which even a cursory glance at the source code, or a look at the compiler warnings, should have in my opinion stopped it being in Sage before it was cleaned up. If the code was thought to be very useful (like Sympow), but of dubious quality (you yourself once wrote Sympow was "virtually obfuscated") https://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel/msg/d7aef307c15de2e6?hl=en then perhaps it should have remained experimental. Or perhaps it should have never been put in Sage, but people used it external to Sage. Dave -- 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
