On Wednesday, May 28, 2014 3:31:08 PM UTC-7, Paul-Olivier Dehaye wrote: > > Again, in the big wave of emails, this one also got misdirected: > > Hi everyone, > > I am looking for people who want to help me, in one way or another, bring > hundreds of new first time contributors to sage. If I do not find enough > partners, I will look for other more suitable python-based projects. > > The idea would be quite simple: teach python programming around some > mathematics (such as combinatorics) and simultaneously produce code that > would be useful for research and worth including in sage. Two catches: > students are given individual problems to work on, and the course is taught > on Coursera. Motivation for the students would come in various ways: > internships, for instance. Quality of the code would be ensured by > peer-testing the programs. >
William Stein has already responded to the major issues regarding the Sage development process, but I would just like to comment on this particular aspect of peer-testing. Having two or more people who have just learned python and do not know much mathematics "peer review" code does not lead to much of an ensured level of quality. Certainly there are other clumps of python aggregating code that are not as daunting as Sage. Numpy and Sympy come to mind, but I doubt that they would really relish a MOOC's-worth of naive contributions, when it is pretty much guaranteed that a very high percentage would, under careful scrutiny, be duplicative, erroneous, poorly coded, or all three. It's a nice thought to get many hands to write code free. But impractical, in spite of Eric Raymond's "Cathedral and Bazaar" essay. "All bugs are shallow with enough eyes" (or whatever the wording is...) is perhaps plausible if the system is itself shallow (like linux). Where I differ with Raymond is I think there are not enough eyes on the planet to make some bugs shallow in a "deep" system-- one that does (say) sophisticated symbolic mathematics. If extra eyes were all that were necessary, there would be no long-standing mathematical conjectures. > If you do not know what Coursera or MOOCs are, you are welcome to take my > upcoming course > https://class.coursera.org/massiveteaching-001 > > If you are interested to play with a MOOC platform yourself, you might want > first to watch the videostream of the 2pm-3pm slot of this conference I am > co-organising on Tuesday: > tinyurl.com/openedx-zurich > as it will help you assess the technical challenges. > > I am looking at a start date for the course of around October-November, and > to bring the discussion off the mailing list (to private) so as to keep an > element of surprise for the students. > > Let me know! > > Paul > > Paul-Olivier Dehaye > SNF Professor of Mathematics > University of Zurich > skype: lokami_lokami (preferred) > phone: +41 76 407 57 96 > chat: paulo...@gmail.com <javascript:> > twitter: podehaye > freenode irc: pdehaye > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
