I suspect you are right, that for large classes of user, Sage will never catch these multimillion dollar companies. They aren't static targets and they sure as hell aren't going to allow Sage to muscle its way in.
Perhaps William is right in trying to focus on making Sage a viable alternative for one particular kind of user: stem undergrads. That is probably an achievable and worthwhile goal. (I'm sure he'd also like it to be a viable alternative for academic mathematicians too, since he is one himself. But quite obviously he's saying that in the design of Sage certain decisions will need to be made if his goal is made a focus.) Bill. On Thursday, 1 October 2015 12:34:25 UTC+2, Dr. David Kirkby (Kirkby Microwave Ltd) wrote: > > On 30 Sep 2015 21:51, "Bill Hart" <goodwi...@googlemail.com <javascript:>> > wrote: > > > > I don't see why would you make people use Sage for that, just so you can > get the Sage usage figures up, instead of writing that as a simple Python > package. > > > > But if Sage could do a lot of the things related to this, which RF > engineers can do with the MATLAB toolbox, then Sage would start becoming a > viable alternative to MATLAB for engineers working in this field. At the > moment, Sage is nowhere near a viable alternative, and I don't think it > will in my lifetime (I'm 51), if ever. > > If you look at Mathematica for example, it has evolved a lot, to add > functionality in areas far removed from version 1.0. Apparently the biggest > user base is actually the financial sector - or at least was a few years > ago. (This possibly hints at another source of funding for Sage - the > financial sector. ) > > I think to be honest, there's a good argument for just re-writing the Sage > "Mission Statement", since realistically the mission has zero chance of > ever being reached, or even approached fairly closely. I don't think you > could come up with any very objective metrics, but I believe the gap > between Mathematica and Sage is widening, as it the gap between Sage and > MATLAB. > > If I am honest, I think the *only* way Sage would ever be a viable > alternative to Mathematica for a very large number of users would be if > Wolfram Research stopped development of the program, either because they > went bust, or decided it was not commercially viable, so stopped > development of it voluntarily. The same argument would apply to MATLAB with > Mathworks. > > Dave > -- 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.
