I mean, people understand, right, that in order to make headway in a given area one needs to become the platform of choice for people in that area.
Just being a viable alternative isn't really enough. It's necessary to actually disrupt (that's the relevant buzzword) to a sufficient extent the dominance of the current technology leader. When it becomes clear that Sage is the platform of choice for that area then the number of users goes up in that area and more developers move to that platform to support their users. I recently sat down with some serious developers and we discussed symbolics in Sage (which I know nothing about). They argued that Sage is not a viable contender in that area, and we discussed some of the possible reasons for that. The thing is, there is nothing even on the horizon which looks likely to disrupt the technology leaders in that area. The same can be said about the areas Magma is currently dominant. The best chance Sage has in that direction is if Magma dies due to some stupidity at the University of Sydney. There's nothing I can see technologically in Sage that even has the potential to disrupt Magma's dominance. Not even in theory. People will point to William's amazing cloud.sagemath.com, but in the final analysis, people will just figure out how to use it to run Magma or Maple. That's great if it means more funding for Open Source software development. But it isn't making real headway with the core problem, which is how to become the platform of choice for serious mathematicians in the core areas of competence of those other projects. 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.
