I definitely think Sage is all about supporting Open Source software development, rather than a single monolithic project called Sage. That's definitely understandable, since everyone who comes to an Open Source project comes with their own vision of what they'd like to achieve with the project.
Sage is more of a platform than a piece of software. Or at least, I am beginning to see it more that way. In my opinion, Sage would have done better if it were more modular. I commonly hear the complaint that Sage is "not a Python package", but "you have to get Sage" to run it. On the other hand, I definitely think Sage tried to diversify too much. It became a Python distribution, without being a Python distribution. A lot of the things Sage has tried to do could perhaps have been better supported as independent Python projects which can be used independently of Sage. (Some are, I know.) But I have to declare my strong bias here. I would personally have liked to see Sage disrupt Magma significantly and focus on being a viable replacement for Magma. I would have like to see Sage adopted by the majority of serious mathematicians in the areas Magma covers. As a piece of software, rather than as a distribution, I would have liked to see Sage more focused on that goal. Instead I think it's become too broad. It's 800 mb of software, most of which I don't need on my PC (it doesn't run on there anyway, so no problem). But what I would have liked to see isn't what the majority of the Sage community envisions when they see Sage. So you are right, Sage is instead a platform which enables people to achieve the specific goals they have in mind, not a single monolithic project which is focused on a certain goal. So a goal of Sage could be to enable more people to put their stuff into the project. But will they? Bill. On Wednesday, 30 September 2015 19:48:05 UTC+2, Nathann Cohen wrote: > > To Bill: > > Reading your post, it seems that what you consider to be Sage's > strength is not Sage's own code but rather the fact that we make many > different softwares coexist in here. > > Seems to give even more reasons to provide easy ways for everybody to > plug things in here. > > Perhaps we should rely much more on system-available tools, instead of > requiring Sage packages? > > Nathann > -- 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.
