On Tuesday, 29 September 2015 10:06:56 UTC-7, Bill Page wrote: > > 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 > <javascript:>> wrote: > > > > On Mon, Sep 28, 2015 at 10:25 AM, Francesco Biscani > > <blues...@gmail.com <javascript:>> 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.
cryptographers (some of them can certainly qualify as engineers) use Magma a lot. > 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.
