Thanks for the thoughtful replies. It's a fine line between being critical of the idea and dismissive of the students. Please everyone limit yourselves to criticizing the idea, as students might come to this thread later. I don't think one should dismiss the students. Look at the Mathworks competition (another thing MATLAB does!), as it is described in Nielsen's book "Reinventing Dicovery". There is a history there of microcontributions on code leading to optimised code. There is also two assumptions in your emails: 1) that they will all have just learned python: the course might be just the right blend of mathematics and CS so that some participants actually a background in python. On top, one can modulate the difficulty progressively to make sure to attract some students who actually have a strong python background already (in MOOCs, there are always some experts lurking) 2) that I would let them choose the topic. Not so. For the specifics of how the course will be run, I need to bring the discussion out of the mailing list.
As William points out, small contributions are important (example in docstring) and the process is currently suboptimal. I would add that other small contributions could be important, such as semantic information coming from professional mathematicians who have just learned utter basics of python, to have a mere sense of how the decorator they have just added will affect the method itself. For this, existing annotation tools suffice. Paul Paul-Olivier Dehaye SNF Professor of Mathematics University of Zurich skype: lokami_lokami (preferred) phone: +41 76 407 57 96 chat: pauloliv...@gmail.com twitter: podehaye freenode irc: pdehaye On Thu, May 29, 2014 at 3:40 AM, rjf <fate...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > 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 >> 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.
