Given the serious situation in Sage funding I suppose that there is still a good reason for continuing this thread.
On 28 September 2015 at 13:37, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Mon, Sep 28, 2015 at 10:25 AM, Francesco Biscani > <bluesca...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> Exactly. And also the mission statement: viable alternative to the Ma's - > >> that is tricky! > > > > I have always felt a tad confused and mislead by this statement. > > > > As someone who has interacted over the years with physicists and engineers > > using daily Mathematica, Maple and Matlab, I see very little overlap between > > their typical use of these tools and the typical usages of SAGE, at least > > from the point of view of a lurker on this list. > ... > 1. Magma is also an Ma. Magma's incredibly good at pure mathematics. > You seem to be leaving out Magma above. > With emphasis on "physicists and engineers" I completely agree with Francesco. I am not aware of any physicists or engineers who use Magma. I never heard of Magma before Sage and I still find Magma of little interest - for physics or engineering. Perhaps I just do not know what I am are missing? Meanwhile I admit that I do know something about Axiom, another system that might be accused of catering to pure mathematics, and I have used it in theoretical physics. And I have also used Sage, or more specifically "Numpy/SciPy/SymPy/Matplotlib" (not to forget also Maxima and probably several other packages transparently wrapped up in Sage) on SMC. Because my collaborator has less tolerance for the current idiosyncrasies of SMC and Sage and a greater familiarity with Maple, I recently back ported one of my more complicated Sage worksheets to Maple. I found it a bit challenging. I have also used Maple for a long time but it turned out that I had used some features in Sage and Numpy for which I did not immediately know the Maple counterpart. However the final result was just fine and convinced me that in many ways Sage is definitely an alternative to Maple even though it may seem more viable to some people than others. > > It seems like SAGE caters > > to (and is run mostly by) researchers in pure mathematics, and that is > > little interest on other use cases. Pragmatically, it seems to me that a > > sizeable chunk of people "doing mathematics on a computer" is today > > better served in the Python space by the Numpy/SciPy/SymPy/Matplotlib > > stack as an alternative to the Ma's rather than SAGE. > > > 2. You say "... better served in the Python space by the > Numpy/SciPy/SymPy/Matplotlib stack as an alternative to the Ma's > rather than SAGE." Sage includes "Numpy/SciPy/SymPy/Matplotlib", > so we don't have to worry about that chunk of people with respect to > our mission statement. > This seems odd from the point of view of marketing strategy. If "Numpy/SciPy/SymPy/Matplotlib" is already an alternative to the Ma's (minus Magma), then is the only point of Sage to add the missing features of Magma? In terms of attracting funding for Sage, I would be worried about showing that Sage provides some obvious added value over just "Numpy/SciPy/SymPy/Matplotlib" for those users. In this regard it is kind of interesting to read: https://github.com/sympy/sympy/wiki/SymPy-vs.-Magma Of course it is a kind of advertisement for Sympy, but something like this might be appropriate for Sage. SMC as a platform on the other hand seems much more agnostic and hopefully is attract some of these users, although there does seem to be some significant competition using a similar tool set. > > This is of course completely fine! I am not questioning anyone's motives, > > inclinations or desires. But IMO continuing to push the idea that SAGE > > aims to be a viable alternative to the Ma's tout-court risks of being a > > source of confusion. > > 3. There is a lot more to mathematics than just what Magma does and > *also* much more to it than just what Numpy/SciPy/SymPy/Matplotlib > do. There's a huge amount of interesting things that could be > systematically computed with in mathematics that no existing package > does yet. > The point being that this is not explicitly part of the Sage "mission statement". Of course there are quite a few people who seem to be trying to do this with Sage but I am not sure whether Sage is more or less an viable alternative for this purpose than an of the Ma's. When it comes to doing new mathematics the flexibility of Python and the complexity of the Sage development infrastructure both seem daunting compared to the tightly integrated mathematics library in a system like Axiom (FriCAS). Bill Page. -- 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.
