On 3 Nov 2014 22:05, "William Stein" <wst...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I usually ignore RJF, but in this I just want to encourage everybody > else to also ignore him too... regarding his discouragement about > everything, especially Ursula's excellent suggestion. I'm sure the > AMS would be very interesting in publishing William, like you I tend to ignore RJF. In engineering terms, his signal to noise ratio is too low! Too much rubbish, with a small amount of useful information. But I think you need to take what RJF said in context, which was a reply to Jason's comment that: "It would be interesting to see if Sage can do the calculation they identified as buggy in mathematica. That would make for a cool follow-up editorial." I don't think the fact Sage can do something that Mathematica can't would form the basis of a cool follow-up editorial. It seems almost childish to try to publish the actual Sage code that computes it correctly. Unless I overlooked it, Ursula made no suggestion, so I can't see how it could be an excellent suggestion. She wrote "So is somebody actively working on a followup editorial/ letter to the editor?" which is a question, not a suggestion. Perhaps I overlooked a suggestion from Ursula. If so I apologise. I can see that there could be a number of follow up comments about the article. But too much emphasis on Sage's ability to perform the computation correctly would make it like a childish pi**ing contest. The question is really what would a follow comment add, that is genuinely useful to the readers? The fact that the database of bugs in open source software are public, but Mathematica's bug list are not, has already been made. I know one of the reasons WRI gave for not making bug reports public is because often they are user errors. Perhaps the mathematical community needs to have an open-access database of bug reports for commercial software. A discussion of the usefulness, legality, practicality, commercial benefits etc. of such a database could be interesting. I wonder if Wolfram Research will write anything? <joke> Would the modest Stephen Wolfram make a humble apology? </joke> Dave. -- 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.
