I think that if you look back at the early rave reviews of Mathematica in such notable scientific journals as the New York Times, you will see that the reporters were impressed by color graphics of 3-d plots and endorsement of such scientific notables as Steve Jobs, Also the eccentric aspects of the humble and modest Stephen Wolfram. Also, giving it away on NeXt machines made an impression. They did not notice that there were (at the time) better graphics programs, better computers, and even more eccentric people. They seem to have lots of them coming from British schools.
Most software developers seeking funding need a "killer app". I don't know that Mathematica has one -- but maybe it is STEM education, since that's the major way of selling lots of systems. There were forays into financial software, engineering, visualization, web hosting, information storage "curated" (Alpha). All of these were however premised on the sale of the system to users, or selling of online services (or maybe ads?) If you insist on free and open source, it seems to me that you get nothing from your markets. So a killer app does nothing for you. (Is this the killer app du jour: rapid dating ?) Who was it who said (approximately) that "I spend my days writing free software so that I can earn money in the evening delivering pizza"? I suggested that the market for my (free, open source) TILU online integration service could be the selling of advertising, presumably to freshman calculus students. ( soft drinks? acne medication? ) but never pursued it. Maybe online ads for Sage??? Otherwise,I think you are left with finding and impressing one of those rich people who thinks math programs are kool. (You will have to judge for yourself how much of the above note is sarcasm.) Good luck. On Thursday, October 1, 2015 at 7:01:40 PM UTC-7, Jonathan wrote: > > > > On Thursday, October 1, 2015 at 2:32:29 AM UTC-5, Jeroen Demeyer wrote: >> >> On 2015-10-01 04:13, Jonathan wrote: >> > high quality zoomable 2-D graphics >> It's interesting that you think that Sage cannot do this. Because I >> think that Matplotlib's plots (which is what Sage uses) are "high >> quality zoomable 2-D graphics". So I wonder what you're missing. >> > > When I say high-quality zoomable, I mean publication quality (see the kind > of plots that appear in Science, American Scientist, Nature or any American > Chemical Society or American Institute of Physics journals) and > interactively zoomable by click and drag. To be useable for most people > they also need GUI adjustment of colors, symbols, etc. I started to work > on some of these features for the 3-D graphics, but simply do not have the > time necessary. Anyway, I like Sage a lot, but we are very short on > resources to bring things to the necessary level in the user interface. > > The backend is good some places and not others, but is potentially very > strong and robust because of the use of other packages. As I track this > discussion, I think that I like the idea of focusing on how to make all > these things easily added and removed packages as necessary. Maybe > ipython/jupyter with good pypi packaging (I'm still not clear on how to > package non-python stuff this way) is the way to go. That would change > Sagemath a lot, but might be a better use of resources. > > Jonathan > > Jonathan > -- 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.
