On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 3:12 PM, Michael Orlitzky <mich...@orlitzky.com> wrote: > On 09/30/2015 02:25 PM, William Stein wrote: >> However, from 2011 to now, year-on-year growth is >> slightly less than 0%. It was maybe -10% from 2013 to 2014. > > There are probably a lot of people like me who haven't been back to > sagemath.org since the switch to git. I just `git pull` every once in a > while.
It's a fair argument that "monthly active users of sagemath.org" is not exactly the same thing as "users of sage", or something else. However, in my experience, when I look at pretty much any measure of the growth of a product in a marketplace -- it doesn't really matter which -- they tend to be highly correlated. I'm not making any claims at all about exact numbers of "users of sage". I'm talking only about year-over-year growth of a well-defined metric. The metric "monthly active visitors to the sagemath.org" website has the advantage that it is well defined and we have data about it going back to before 2008, so it is useful. I'm concerned because here was basically no year-over-year growth of that metric since 2011. This lack of growth should be a serious cause of concern for us Sage developers. It is concrete numerical data that complements Bill Hart's concerns expressed elsewhere: "There's nothing I can see technologically in Sage that even has the potential to disrupt Magma's dominance. Not even in theory." Sage is very good and useful in many ways to us. However, just as Bill points out, there are very, very real difficulties, and thinking about them strategically -- which is what Bill suggested we do above -- is a really good suggestion. He made a list of questions, and I've also shared my current strategy above (basically: undergraduate STEM education!). I hope people will support my suggestion, and be as supportive as possible of efforts to improve Sage to make it better for undergraduate teaching -- let's try to listen to and appreciate what people like Karl Dieter Crisman, Rob Beezer, Gregory Bard, and Paul Zimmerman, and these other people suggest carefully, since they have tons of classroom experience and great ideas. Let's make new documentation like Gregory Bard's "Sage for undergraduates" book. In the long run if Sage is used 1000 times as much in undergraduate classrooms, the Sage project will be much better off, though this might sometimes mean making painful design decisions that are less supportive of research. -- William > > -- > 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. -- William (http://wstein.org) -- 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.
