On Thu, Apr 30, 2015 at 12:34 PM, Bill Page <bill.p...@newsynthesis.org> wrote: > On 30 April 2015 at 13:34, Dima Pasechnik <dimp...@gmail.com> wrote: >> On Thursday, 30 April 2015 17:11:39 UTC+1, Bill Page wrote: >> ... >> well, for rants we have a special newsgroup called sage-flame. >> > > Yes, although I consider what I wrote more of an inconvenient > statement of fact so maybe I used the wrong tag.
You stated 'that the Sage developer emphasis on "doc tests" has resulted in any fewer errors or problems in Sage in comparison to other systems.' I'm not sure if I should respond to this, but I'm going to. Note that Sage is mostly *interpreted* so having extensive doctests is critical to maintain any possibility of sanity over time and with a large number of developers (512 people listed at http://trac.sagemath.org/ right now). I won't claim that Sage's doctests make Sage have "fewer errors or problems" than the other systems you use (they surely have their own approaches to testing). However, I absolutely claim -- and I'm sure anybody with nontrivial Sage development experience will agree -- that the Sage testing standards are critical to Sage having any chance of survival and usability at all. It's entirely an internal issue. Please also note that Sage is mostly interpreted and not statically compiled like some software, which further increases the need for extensive testing. Also, the testing in Sage serves an important dual purpose -- it makes it easier for people to actually use Sage -- instead of trying to read documentation and deduce via logic how to compute something, you have the option to try an example that does work, and adapt it to your problem. In contrast, I just tried browsing the FRICAS api documentation [1], and couldn't find a single example. If I wanted to just play around a little to see how things work following [1], it would be incredibly difficult for me. There are also many people who have contributed massively to Sage by working on porting, valgrinding, etc., who simply wouldn't have been able to contribute anything of value without the test suite existing. [1] http://fricas.github.io/api/genindex.html William > >> sorry for teaching you a part of sage development process against your >> will :-) > > Not at all. In fact you already offered to do it for me - what could > be easier for me than that! > > Cheers, > Bill. > > -- > 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. -- William (http://wstein.org) -- 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.
