Hello!
Just in case somebody is still interested in opinions on the initial
topic.
Since I'm not familiar with Matlab myself, I asked some people who is
familiar "Why do they choose Matlab and not any other system, for
example, Sage".
- Most of them didn't know about Sage at all till that moment.
- Most of them started to use Matlab just because they heard this word
from other students / PhD students / lecturers and once they got used
to it, they want nothing else.
- Some of them a ready to switch to ANY other system any time IF they
find it more useful or more suitable for their work.
- Some of them had not used any kind of CAS before and are ready to
start with any system (including Sage) if somebody teaches them how to
work with it.
These two last categories seem the most promising to me. And while
the people from the latter one do not make any decisions basing on
*their own* opinion, people from the former one tend to be more
conscious and flexible. What they need is a set of functions they use
in their work (with any names - not necessarily matching those from
Matlab), a detailed reference manual to look for such functions and
their usage and a huge amount of ready recipes and scripts on the
Internet for copy-pasting into their own programs.
For example, one of them said: "When I need to use some relatively
new method, it is very likely that I will find its implementation in a
form of a Matlab script (or maybe he said "toolbox" - I'm not sure
about how they call it) much earlier that in any other language/system.
That is why I just take it and use it. And of course, I need to use
Matlab to run it."
Another example - one of them asked me: "Where can I find a complete
list of functions available in Sage?" I had to explain him that Sage
includes a number of mathematical packages each one having its own
documentation, reference manuals, examples and so on on their websites.
But such an answer simply sounds like "I don't know". And what kind of
help is that?
So, summarizing all stated above, it seems to me that the main cause
of Sage being undervalued is the lack of documentation/books/reference
manuals/forums/ready recipes/etc. in different languages. For example,
almost all people in xUSSR countries usually look for some kind of
support in Russian. And that's quite a lot of people. They can easily
obtain any kind of help on Matlab in Russian, but they can get almost
no help at all in Russian for Sage.
P.S. None of them mentioned the syntax differences, namely in the
matrix notation, although this probably does not say much by itself
Regards,
Vladimir
On Mon, 15 Aug 2011 12:58:38 -0700
William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> If somebody walked up to *you* and asked: "Is Sage now a viable
> alternative to MATLAB?" what would you say?
> I'm especially interested in what people who do numerical/applied
> computation think.
>
> My answer: "It's very difficult for *me* to answer this question
> myself, because MATLAB is useless for most of my own
> teaching/research/work, but I realize it is very widely used in
> applied mathematics. Based on going to Scipy and the resources I've
> seen online, it appears that the Numpy/Scipy stack is extremely useful
> to actual people doing numerical computation. Maybe I'll try
> asking on sage-devel."
>
> [NOTE: I am interested in people's answers, rather than somebody
> hijacking this thread to try to define "viable alternative" or say
> this isn't a scientific survey or something. Please try not to hijack
> this thread. Thanks!]
>
> -- William
>
-----
<v...@ukr.net>
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