> But there is a way to make code work in Sage as upgrades happen - making it > a part of Sage :-) > Thus I don't buy this "future-proof" statement (well, of course, Sage may > fold if sufficient number of right people get hit by a bus - but the same > is true for Magma)
It has something to do with the friction that William mentioned, though: researchers barely has the time and motivation to implement their algorithms, but they don't want to afterwards go through the - for new-comers - rather arduous trac/ticket/reviewing process. One reason is probably that they don't want to mature the doc and API of their code sufficiently for it to enter sage-proper. I used to maintain a coding theory library on bitbucket for exactly this reason. Their work could be more available if Sage wasn't so monolithic, or at least, if there was more of a culture of having small Sage packages floating around. If you want their not-completely-nicely-documented code, install their package into your Sage and be at your own risk. What Luca is talking about poses a problem for that strategy though: their code will work with only a few versions of Sage before breaking. Note that I don't personally share this experience: in my own coding theory library for Sage, no function was (AFAIK) broken in the last 5 years due to a Sage update (except for my own bugs, and some stuff related to non-standard packaging). But of course: if research developers 1) don't care enough about their own code to polish it enough for going through our review process, and 2) don't care enough to fix it when incompatibilities with Sage occurs; then is it really code we should be caring about? Won't it quickly rot on github anyway? The research code going into Magma is exactly polished during those visits to Magma HQ that Dima mentions. Best, Johan -- 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.
