> > I read W. Stein's blog on why he thinks Sage is failing since it isn't on >> par with Maple, Mathematica and other Ma*'s *now*. >> >> I teach high schoolers and college students. At that level Sage is more >> than adequate as a replacement for all Ma*'s now. >> > > I am curious as to what parts of Sage you use. I suspect you are using it > mostly as a front-end to Maxima, > In which case -- have you considered using Maxima directly, esp. wxmaxima? > > Thanks for any info. > >
I don't know for Chris what the case is, but Sage currently only uses Maxima directly in calculus for integration, limits, and summation (not derivatives, not plotting, not symbolics or most arbitrary precision numerics any more). Which is of course important, and one could probably use wxMaxima quite nicely for this. In fact, if I had started using computers in collegiate teaching for calculus, perhaps I would have used it. But when I was looking for such a program, it was in number theory, not calculus. (Though I do teach an awful lot of calculus.) I wanted the easiest interface possible, and having students just surf to a website and make a page was awfully easy. I wanted something that was comprehensive, and it was. Naturally, different contexts require different solutions. We are happy to be working on support for people to use Ipython and the Python scientific stack directly in Sage, because that meets some needs. Certainly for many users RStudio is by far superior for their data needs. And so forth - perhaps for many engineers, wxMaxima is the right choice. If so, that is great and useful. But Sage seems to have the comprehensive magic touch, and it keeps on meeting my needs. For instance, the Sage cell is perfect for sending little interactive exercises to students I don't want opening ANY mathematics program, whether in the browser or on the desktop. (Not because they can't learn it, but because it would take far too much time based on their background.) I think many feel the same way about it. My hope is that the open-source math ecosystem can have this attitude in general - it's not a zero-sum game by any means, at least not at this time. And so there are some things that Maxima is not as well suited for as Sage - and yes, many people use those things. Or perhaps some instructor needs an interface thing. Or (and truly this is nontrivial) the underlying programming language *does* make a difference, and Python is just ... easier. (For instance, one of my current students learned to program on paper, I am told. She did not use a computer for it until she arrived here and now she actually knows how to use Python after three weeks - I was not the teacher, btw.) Anyway, Sage is more than a front end to Maxima, even for calculus. And that's not really saying anything bad about Maxima! It just is different, that's all. - 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.
