On Thu, 09 Sep 2010 at 11:47AM +0200, Jan Groenewald wrote: > Mathematica is touring South Africa. > http://www.wolfram.com/events/southafrica2010/ > I expect their presentation to be very professional. > > Reviving an old topic since Mathematica is visiting our Free Software > supporting institute www.aims.ac.za on Monday. It happens to be the > first day of a 3-week course on SAGE! I would like to send the > students some articles to read and to be informed on my main > objections > [...] > > Does anyone have anything to add, especially updating the last point > above, as the blistering speed of SAGE development surely have solved > some of those weaknesses. I find the plotting perfectly adequate.
Here are two things that come to mind: First, Sage is a sort of ecosystem. There's the actual software you download in the tarballs, but there's a huge cloud of related software around Sage: SageTeX (okay, that's included, but it links up with TeX, which isn't), Rob Beezer's LaTeX-to-worksheet translator, and all the Python stuff that you can put right into Sage. The open source nature makes it very easy for a new "species" to arise that fills a new "ecological niche". With proprietary software, any other software that contributes to the ecosystem exists at the whim of the controlling company. For example, in graduate school, several of my friends and I got very good at using LiveGraphics3D, which was a Java applet that made it super easy to put Mathematica-generated graphics on the web. (See examples at http://www.math.umn.edu/~drake/tes.html.) Wolfram decided to do their Demonstrations thing, which isn't nearly as useful, and in Mathematica 6 changed things so that LiveGraphics3D didn't work. They didn't like this other species and decided to get rid of it. With Sage, such a thing is effectively impossible. Second, there's the "dog whistle symphony" effect. You mentioned that the price of Mathematica is extremely high for South African students. Well, imagine the prices of Mathematica and Maple were low enough so that a student or professor could afford one, but not both. You buy Mathematica and write some lovely code. Your friend buys Maple and then wants to collaborate with you -- but your Mathematica code is useless to him or her. It's like you wrote a symphony played with dog whistles -- maybe it's great, but we humans can't hear it. To use Sage, you need an internet connection. If I wrote some Sage code to compute something, basically anyone who is interested can run that Sage code. You can put Sage code in a post on one of those online forums for high school math students; you can include Sage code in research papers -- and anyone who sees it can use that code. Even if proprietary software is reasonably affordable, it ends up putting barriers between people in the mathematical community. Dan -- --- Dan Drake ----- http://mathsci.kaist.ac.kr/~drake -------
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