The title they gave it -- 'William Stein says "Sage has overall > failed"' -- seems a bit sensational. I think that if people read > the blog post they will see that I don't mean that the enormous effort > that people like Volker, Jereon, etc., are doing, isn't a fantastic > job. I'm measuring progress specifically in terms of the original > mission statement. > > To be fair, you did kind of invite that interpretation with a somewhat dramatic line like that. Sage clearly IS a viable alternative, and basically is a replacement at the undergraduate level. It is not a replacement for everything - perhaps we need a jump like the combinat and matroid crowds did in arithmetic geometry? But neither are they replacements for Sage at this point, right, in many areas? Again, Sage is a viable alternative even for Matlab. It's not as good for this as Octave, apparently, and no third-party support etc. - but some people do use it, or they wouldn't be asking for help.
So I think that it would have been better to say that the statement that has failed is a viable *replacement* for all four M's. Well, that would be a hard goal indeed! For precisely the reasons you give. I don't think that makes Sage a failure, it just makes it different. Presumably Maple and Mathematica are not replacements for each other either. - kcrisman -- 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.
