I completely agree - very well said, except that you don't actually _need_ an internet connection to use Sage. And in fact South Africa had rather low bandwidth when I was there (hopefully that's improved with some new cables) but Jan's lab was running Sage beautifully.
-Marshall On Sep 9, 6:42 pm, Dan Drake <dr...@kaist.edu> wrote: > 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 institutewww.aims.ac.zaon 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 > athttp://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 > ------- > > signature.asc > < 1KViewDownload -- To post to this group, send email to sage-support@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-support+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-support URL: http://www.sagemath.org
