On Sat, Jan 2, 2016 at 10:41 AM, kcrisman <kcris...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> You still haven't understood that this is about how to create new >> notebooks. We have the legacy support covered by shipping the old notebook. >> Also, I don't recall Microsoft bundling a free copy of word 2007 with word >> 2010, you are comparing apples and oranges. >> > > ?? > > MS Word still supports pretty old .doc files - and cheerfully asks to > upgrade them to .docx or whatever. LibreOffice is even better - I can open > ClarisWorks documents well over a decade old with it. And I bet (though I > haven't used Maple in many years) that when they switched to their > Java-based "Clickable Calculus" thing (that was how it worked, right?) that > they upgraded worksheets for use in the new system. Ditto for Mma? > > That's what I'm talking about. "Legacy support" for us cannot be about > treating people with a lot of sagenb worksheets like a company with COBOL > programs that need continued support but will not have new stuff written > from scratch in. If Jupyter really is the future, and Sage really wants to > be professional about a transition to it, it needs to provide an *easy* and > *effective* upgrade path for worksheets created in sagenb (and, presumably, > in sagews format, I don't know if they convert?) to that. (See the rst2sws > and sws2rst and tex2sws and sws2tex for some interesting conversions in > addition to the several successive conversions William has written over the > years.) > > Think of all of the people we have not been able to gain to Sage over the > years because we don't have a simple Maple -> Sage or Mma -> Sage converter. > (I'm not complaining about that! I don't think such people recognize the > technical hurdle there. But if there were such things, we would have a lot > more users, I think it's fairly clear.) Similarly, not having a sagenb -> > ipynb (or whatever the future brings) converter that is reliable may cause > people to just go back to whatever they were using beforehand, or to say the > heck with it. > > (By the way, as to location - one could let the user decide, with a default > of ~/MyOldSageWorksheets or some such nonsense, if there was an interactive > GUI or script or web thing on the sagenb or sage or jupyter side. No need > to have a specific default because not everyone will upgrade.) > > Otherwise, I don't want to hear any complaints about people sticking with > proprietary solutions that do cover such upgrades. The reality is that most > people stick with the devil they know. This isn't about technical > superiority; it's about treating our users as if they have exactly enough > time to use Sage, and very little to do anything else regarding upgrades or > whatever. Because who will guarantee that in five years there won't be > some brand-new toy instead of Jupyter? We already see Julia and Nemo as the > hot new thing (in a different direction than the notebooks, of course); what > can we predict for the next five years in terms of anything? (Perhaps > OpenDreamKit will help in that regard.) > > By the way, 'whatever' means not just 'upgrades to notebooks' but also 'hard > documentation to search' and 'I still don't know if Sage works in El > Capitan' and lots of other things I get personal message about fairly > regularly that I don't necessarily pass on here. This is just a symptom of > the usual F/LOSS problem of being written largely for the developers - which > is way, way less fair to say about Sage than many other projects,
Karl, It's not "the usual F/LOSS problem", it's the usual problem of a volunteer project with almost no funding. There is a ton of high quality well funded FLOSS software out there that doesn't have this problem (e.g., Firefox, Chromium, parts of OS X, the swift language, ...) For better or worse, I think we just have to acknowledge the reality of the situation, and move on and do a very bad job in the above regards compared to the well funded alternatives until/if we do eventually get funding. Right now, it is best of the Sage project focuses squarely on its core competence, which is research level pure mathematics, (and I hope also undergrad math teaching). I think there is no question that if some group popped up and implemented all the automated backwards compatibility, and other nice things that you describe above, all very good quality, and with proper review on trac, then Volker would smile and merge it in seconds. Implementing this stuff we want is precisely what is nearly impossibly hard for any sane research mathematician to justify spending serious time on. For now, let's just move on, make Jupyter (which just got $6,000,000 in funding recently) the default, and deal with the pain and continued failure to grow. Maybe someday things will be different. -- William -- 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 https://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
