On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 9:11 AM, parisse <bernard.pari...@ujf-grenoble.fr> wrote: > > > Le vendredi 26 février 2016 16:54:54 UTC+1, William a écrit : >> >> >> Just to clarify (and make things easier), the mission statement, and >> indeed Sage itself, is about the *entire ecosystem* of open source >> math software, including your software (Giac, which is of course >> installed on SageMathCloud). This is why Sage has always had >> interfaces to most other computer algebra systems, why a large amount >> of effort has been put into making Python interact well with Maxima, >> Singular, etc., and why one of our slogans is "Building the car >> instead of reinventing the wheel". > > > I understand that, and I fully agree with the goal of making open source > softwares interact well, while I disagree with making C/C++ open-source > libraries (and CAS) interact at the Python language level instead of at the > C/C++ level, because it means that it's difficult to use something else than > Python if you want to benefit from the "network-effect" of interacting > libraries. For example, singular and giac have both interfaces to sage, but > that does not help singular and giac interacting directly, same for > pari/singular, pari/giac, etc.
I think we have done a bit at the C/C++ level too. For example, when we started making Singular work with Sage, it was via a horrible pexpect pseudo tty interface. So we (=mainly Martin Albrecht) wrote from scratch a C++ library interface to Singular. And then used Cython to provide a Python interface to that C++ library. When I was at MEGA in Barcelona in 2008, I remember the talk on Singular in which the biggest exciting announcement for the last year was... Martin's C++ interface. I think what Martin Albrecht wrote will help enormously if you want to create a giac <--> singular interface, since you don't have to start from scratch... Of course, much more in this direction can and should be done, as you suggest above. And it genuinely would provide more value to the community. There are many little things in Sage that would be better spun off, to provide greater overall value in the longrun. I hope that happens. >> Much of the Python library we have developed called "sage" is (or at >> least was initially) mainly focused on functionality that was only >> available in Magma, since that was a huge gap in the available open >> source code at the time. > > > It's not only functionality, it's also the way the user enters math objects > that make me say sage is more an alternative to Magma than to the other M, > it is indeed well adapted to mathematicians working in domains near algebra > who like rings, fields and so on but probably not as well elsewhere. And of > course sage includes Python libraries that offer matlab-like > functionnalities, but in these areas, the users who don't want (or can't > afford) matlab will probably prefer running these libraries directly from a > native Python interpreter, because this does not require as much ressources, > it also works under windows, and they don't care much of additionnal CAS > functionnalities. My hope is only that they don't have to use Matlab if they don't want to. If the open source community is solving their problems, I'm very happy. > But as I understand your messages about SMC, SMC is much more agnostic than > sage, it's more about providing users easy access to opensource math > software/languages, and also a hosting service and collaboration platform. I > think there is/will be a lot of competition in this area, that's why I have > choosen a complementary approach with my CAS : in the browser but offline > once downloaded (http://www-fourier.ujf-grenoble.fr/~parisse/xcasen.html). > Perhaps both approachs will help gain more opensource math software users, > therefore I wish you good luck! I agree -- there is/will be a lot of competition in this area. SMC is open source and possible to download and run locally, but for now that is not our focus (as you know, it takes a lot of time to maintain and one has to choose how to spend time). Thanks for sharing your thoughts, -- 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 https://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 https://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
