Nicolas, I wish you the best with a European grant based on Sage. Don't forget Singular! (Flint and MPIR are also European, but these might be too low level for your interests, I don't know.)
The key to success with these European grants, I have been led to believe (by people who have gotten them and who have applied), is demonstrating that you have a strong network of interested individuals willing to participate in the project, and who will directly benefit from doing so. It's not the only key, but an important one. Now I will add my 2c worth. And bear in mind this is coming from someone who doesn't contribute to Sage directly, and who only recently began doing computer algebra proper. One of the biggest things European software projects like Pari, Gap, Singular need is contributions. I congratulate Peter Bruin on announcing that he is writing a power series module for Sage based on Pari instead of on polynomials. However, in a project like that, I hope that when some functionality (mathematical or otherwise) is perceived to be missing from Pari, that it will be contributed *to the Pari project directly*. And I don't mean as a set of Sage build patches or bug reports. I mean as a set of Pari contributions, to their code base, in their coding style, instead of writing more code in Sage directly! Why is this important? Because otherwise you would be taking European money and using it to fund a project which originated in the US (I think it fair to call it a US project). It does not enrich European software to be developing Sage. This is crucial from the point of view of referees, in my opinion (again, please bear in mind this is my own personal opinion, and doesn't necessarily reflect the opinion of anyone else I have anything to do with). Another thing to consider in such a proposal is building bridges between such projects. At present, some of the projects I've mentioned would desperately like to be in a wider Europe-wide collaboration (that is my understanding, anyway). But a bridge needs to be built between the projects, both technologically and cooperatively, in order to achieve this. Both desperately need funding and competent engineers to do the work! I don't personally see Sage as an ideal vehicle for this because its needs are strongly biased towards other things. But I wish you all the best with such an endeavour. By the way, I don't think Sage is a bandwagon in Europe any longer. It has pockets of strong support, especially in education in France. The fact that it is Free certainly appeals to the European sense of human rights, open access, fairness, liberty, respect for all persons, etc. But these points only help push a proposal over the line. They don't constitute the core thrust of such a proposal. Please talk to people running projects locally here in Europe, because you apparently aren't the only one with the same idea at this time. And please try to view this from the perspective of developers working in those projects. They have no interest whatsoever in contracts expire for working on their respective projects and being rehired to work on Sage itself. Any such proposal should be geared towards benefiting those European software projects directly and improving the (dire) state of affairs here in Europe. Sage has some great things going for it. It provides an interface to numerous Open Source projects that otherwise don't and can't talk to each other (I mean technologically). As a glue, Sage is awesome. Sage is also great in that it maintains interfaces to numerous projects with the *same* functionality. This makes it possible to compare results from different projects, or to get results from a different project if your preferred system has a problem. Or naturally, if the computation you want is too slow in one system, you can ask another system. But Sage alone doesn't solve the bridge problem. The component projects are still no more connected than they were before. A Singular user can no more talk to Gap or Pari than they could before. The only beneficiaries are Sage users. Furthermore, Sage is a cobbled inconsistent mess, precisely because of all the differing conventions in these projects. Assumptions in one system may not be the same in another, and input/output will be presented in differing ways. Exceptions are handled inconsistently. And most importantly, there may not even be mathematical consistency. Remember, Europeans absolutely love coming up with standards! (Not that they are very good at it. :-() This is all to say nothing of the glaring problems, such as the lack of Windows 64 support in such systems or indeed Sage. There are difficulties in finding which files are involved in implementing a given algorithm (the easiest way I know in Sage is to run the algorithms in a loop and press CTRL-C to get a stack trace!!). There is a lack of documentation on what algorithms are implemented, what their complexities are, or references. Some projects are not threadsafe. Testing is lacking and quite a bit of stuff just doesn't work and never did. And there is a general lack of credit given to individual developers in Europe by their own projects. Most importantly there is a culture of not giving appropriate academic credit to individuals who have made significant contributions to writing mathematical software. I don't see that Sage has contributed to fixing a single one of these hard problems. That's my 2c worth. The idea of mounting a campaign to get sustained European funding for European mathematical software is a good one which I fully support. But please let's leverage the incredibly strong expertise and experience that exists in Europe to actually deal with the hard problems of mathematical software. Again, best of luck with your proposal! I think it is a great idea if executed well. Bill. On Thursday, 28 August 2014 22:22:32 UTC+2, Nicolas M. Thiéry wrote: > > Hi! > > For whatever two cents it's worth, here is my modest analysis of the > situation and how I'll try to contribute to tackle this. > > I am using the same metric as William: is Sage becoming a viable > alternative to XXX. However, by this, I don't mean that it should > completely take over the niche and bring its competitor to bankruptcy. > Nor even that it should take over a large proportion of the > niche. Just that Sage shall be good enough for most users in the niche > to have the real choice to use it. Or to use something else. > > To this respect, I think Sage is doing quite well. For example, many > universities in France are progressively switching to Sage, both for > research and education. Better, our national competition that recruits > math teachers for high schools -- whose training include some non > trivial computer algebra -- have recently ruled out non open source > software for its oral exams, when they used to be mostly > Maple/Mathematica/Matlab based. Maybe our book [1] contributed a tiny > bit to this. At least, it's by writing it that we convinced ourselves > that Sage was already a non perfect but viable alternative for > education. > > Maybe this difference of appreciation with William just stems from > different expectations. I can understand William's frustration that > things are not going as fast as he would have dreamed it to be. Yet, > nine years ago, when I read the Sage mission statement, I thought it > was extraordinary bold. In fact, from past experience, I was > originally giving peanuts to Sage's success, and I thought that > William had no idea of the difficulty of the endeavor. Well, ever > since then, I have been super glad to have been proven wrong :-) And > even though I am often frustrated that things are going slow, I am > neither surprised nor disappointed. > > Altogether, the development model, developed by users for users, is > mostly doing the job. However there are some areas that have been > mentioned here (packaging&distribution, documentation, notebook, > graphics, ...) that are lagging behind because it's too technical to > do be taken care of as a side product of the daily job of users. > > To get around this, I believe we need to externalize as much as we can > to larger communities (e.g. transition quickly from the Sage notebook > to the IPython notebook, use pip, ...) *and* find funding for a few > full-time developers. > > William believes in SMC to drive in such funding. I am not necessarily > convinced by some aspects of the strategy, but I am glad he is > exploring this potential opportunity. The situation is complicated, > and we don't know for sure what's the right approach; probably there > are several complementary ones. Anyone with a vision should just try > hard and follow his beliefs. > > On my side, I am going to coordinate a European grant application > (submission: January 2015) around the Sage ecosystem (including GAP, > Pari, ...), with main goal to fund a couple full time devs over the > next few years: > > https://github.com/sagemath/grant-europe > > I have honestly no idea of the odds of success. Probably low, although > we do fit quite well within the call; riding the open wave is > fashionable these days. So let's just be bold. The other challenge > will be to find good candidates for such developer positions. > > If you'd be interested in participating, please get in touch and > join. If you'd be potentially interested in becoming a full time Sage > dev in Europe (or associated country) for a couple years, please > contact me as well. > > For information: we will have a preparatory meeting for this grant > application on September 8-9th in Orsay. Feel free to join. > > Cheers, > Nicolas > > [1] http://sagebook.gforge.inria.fr/ > > PS for William: please be super careful with wording. Referees of > grant applications will look around to access the value of Sage and > its chances of success. > > > -- > Nicolas M. Thiéry "Isil" <nth...@users.sf.net <javascript:>> > http://Nicolas.Thiery.name/ > -- 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. 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