On 28 Sep 2015 18:25, "Francesco Biscani" <bluesca...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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. 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. > > 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. > > Cheers, > > Francesco. I tend to agree, even though I am aware Sage included Numpy/SciPy/SymPy/Matplotlib. Octave, which is a MATLAB clone, is supported as an optional package, though personally if I wanted to use Octave, I would run Octave. One thing that Sage could do with, which might attract some engineers, is GPIB and RS-232 support to control instruments, which is a small part of the MATLAB instrument control toolbox. http://uk.mathworks.com/products/instrument/ I think the ability to control instruments from MATLAB, is essential. GPIB (IEEE-488) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE-488 is one way to communicate with them, and is the only method used on older instruments. Some low-cost modern instruments use USB and/or LAN, but the more expensive modern instruments will use USB, LAN and GPIB. Some instruments can be controlled via RS-232. I believe a Python plugin exists for GPIB. A lot of instruments have GPIB connectivity. If I look in my lab, I have some instruments with GPIB and some without. The list with GPIB support is much longer than without. *WITH* GPIB * HP 8753ES 300 kHz to 3 GHz vector network analyser * HP 8720D 50 MHz to 20 GHz vector network analyser * 22 GHz Spectrum analyzer based on HP 70000 modular measurement system * 4 x Agilent power supplies, of various voltages & currents * HP 8970A noise figure meter. * 20 GHz HP 83623A sweep generator * 4.2 GHz HP 8665A signal generator * 1 GHz Marconi 2022D signal generator * 20 GHz IFR 2187 programmable stepped attenuator. * Stanford Research DS345 30 MHz function generator * HP 438A Dual channel power meter. * EG&G 7260 lock in amplifier. * HP 4284A precision frequency reference * 18 GHz HP frequency counter * HP 3457A 6.5 digit bench multimeter WITHOUT GPIB * HP 58503A GPS locked frequency reference - that has RS232 control. * 2 x handheld Tektronix 4.5 digit multimeters. * Peak ESR70 meter. * HP 100 MHz HP oscilloscope. - although GPIB is an option on this. I guess adding the GPIB module into Sage, would allow instruments to be controlled, would be one small step towards making it attractive to engineers, especially if there was an online demo of real time streaming of data from some test equipment. But realistically, Francesco is right, there's not a lot to attract engineers using MATLAB or Mathematica. Personally my experience is most engineers use MATLAB or Labview - I see very few using Mathematica or Maple. It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation. Until you get more engineers using Sage, you wont get the engineering tools engineers need. Until those tools exists, you wont get engineers using Sage. So Francesco is right. With Sage not having anywhere near the functionality of MATLAB for engineers, it is not going to attract them, so it is not a viable alternative. Just look at the toolboxes available for MATLAB http://uk.mathworks.com/products/ any you will soon see Sage is far from a viable alternative to MATLAB. Sage may be more of a viable alternative to Mathematica and Maple. Dr David Kirkby (A chartered engineer but *not* a mathematician) -- 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.
