On 1 October 2015 at 13:07, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Thu, Oct 1, 2015 at 9:38 AM, Bill Page <bill.p...@newsynthesis.org> wrote: >> [Changed thread subject from: Sources of funding - perhaps computer >> manufacturers? ] >> >> What I find hard to swallow is the peculiar mix of "parent", >> "category", and Python data types (class system and inheritance). In >> spite of the available documentation in the category system in Sage, I > > Just curious -- Bill Page, did you ever take a graduate mathematics > course in "category theory", or at least a course that had a > significant portion devoted to it, or at least carefully read (and did > exercises!) from a textbook on category theory?
Yes, yes, and yes. > Because despite > being called "abstract nonsense" by some, category is a serious, > highly technical, and nontrivial area of mathematics, with interesting > theorems, a long development, etc., just like other areas of math. > Yes, certainly. I consider category theory an appropriate foundation for a very large part of mathematics. > I would expect that somebody who doesn't know category theory (the > mathematical area) would find the category framework in Sage very > confusing, just like somebody who doesn't know calculus might find the > symbolic functionality confusing. No, I find the Sage implementation of these ideas confusing, or at the very least overly complicated. I am sure that if I had a good reason and enough energy to want to overcome this impression (pre-conception?) then I would probably find categories in Sage very useful. It certainly seems to be useful to at least a small core of developers in Sage. It is important also to keep in mind what are called "categories" in Axiom have a best only an indirect connection to mathematical category theory. To my knowledge there has been only a bit of work done in trying to actually implement some form of category theory in Axiom/Aldor. http://axiom-wiki.newsynthesis.org/CategoryTheoryAndAxiom -- 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.
