On Friday, December 5, 2014 8:17:44 AM UTC+1, Nathann Cohen wrote: > > Helloooooo everybody ! > > I am preparing some Sage talk, and I wanted to say at some point: > "Honestly we are not that good. We have strong points but we miss many > things too. It all depends on what the developpers are interested in: we > are great on some research areas, and under water level on others" > > Somehow this question is also related to William's "Sage has failed", as > we cannot be a replacement for Mathematica/Maple/.... unless we cover all > kinds of mathematics. > > In your past experiences (possibly when using Sage to teach in a > classroom), in which areas do you think we are behind users' expectations ? >
* Symbolics in general. Symbolic integration and summation. Rewriting expressions. Simplifying inequalities. Simplifying expressions subject to assumptions involving inequalities. Limits and generalized series expansions involving special functions. Sage can do a bit of these things via Maxima and SymPy, but it's nowhere near as powerful as Mathematica. * Many numerical functions do not work with arbitrary precision. In Mathematica and Maple, arbitrary precision works seamlessly pretty much everywhere. In Sage, a lot of functions are hardcoded for double precision. A first step would be to provide really solid support for basic numerical calculus (like computing integrals, #8321) by leveraging what's available in Pari and mpmath. When it comes to things like multivariate optimization, solving ODEs and PDEs, etc. with arbitrary precision, I don't think there's any open source software that competes with Mathematica. * Performance. You often run into a wall as soon as you do anything slightly complicated in Sage that isn't directly wrapping the right C/C++/Cython implementation. Bill Hart had an example of computing a resultant of two large (but not astronomically large) multivariate polynomials over a finite field, where Magma does it in a minute, Bill's Julia code does it in 5 seconds, and he had to kill Sage after waiting for hours... Fredrik -- 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.
