Alfredo, On October 12, 2006 11:57 AM you wrote: > > Hi Bill, > > Wondering if you are back from Sage Days, and how did it go?
Yes, I am back. I would say that it went "well". And I have a lot more to write about it when I have more time and energy - maybe tomorrow. In short: The Sage developers are certainly an enthusiastic, energetic and ambitious group. I think Sage development benefits greatly by being based in a university post-graduate environment and with a lead developer who seems very much "in-tune" with current open source development practices. I wish Axiom had an active sponsor of this kind... But I was also a little disappointed because although one of the main slogan's of the Sage project goes something like: "We are inventing the Car, not re-inventing the Wheel", it seems to me that there is a danger that Sage development has already started to slide down the slippery slope to that part of any system that necessarily touches the ground. :-) I think one of the main contributions of Sage to computer algebra so far has been to demonstrate that it is possible to produce a system in a widely used modern high level language (Python) which incorporates and integrates a diverse group of existing computer algebra systems into a coherent whole. In principle this permits one to learn a single user interface language but still benefit from the huge intellectual (and often financial) investments into these other systems. I am very much in favour of building this sort of bridge as a way to preserve and benefit from this prior work. Of course Sage needs some native symbolic computation ability in order to serve this intermediate role. But following the initial success at this endeavour, it seems that it is nearly impossible to resist the urge to attempt to re-implement in a more "Pythonic" way, the same features that are already available in the base packages. For example, there was a lot of discussion at the meeting about implementing Padic integers as a computational domain in Sage. I don't know anything about Padic integers but during a quick presentation of the new Axiom interface that I wrote during the coding sprints I demonstrated that Axiom actually already implements at least one of the methods of representing Padics that was being discussed. Of course, as Axiom developers we already know that the Axiom algebra library covers large (and sadly, mostly undocumented) area of computational mathematics. I do sincerely hope that making Axiom more accessible to the Sage developers will help prevent some re-invention of these "wheels". At this meeting there was a lot of talk about the need to write Sage-specific code using Pyrex (Python to "C" compiler) http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/greg.ewing/python/Pyrex for such things as linear algebra and efficient exact integer arithmetic. And even discussion about the possibility of modifying Pyrex to make it a more suitable compiler language for Sage. As interesting as these projects might be to the current Sage developers, to me this seems to be a path too near the old slippery slope. > Sorry I was not able to go...the real world hit me in the > face :-S. Yes, life does seem to that to do that to us sometimes. ;) I hope things improve for you. I am sure you would have enjoyed the meeting. > > I saw that in the Sage Wiki that you have a prototype of the > interface Axiom/Sage. Yes. You can run it on axiom-developer.org although it is still very preliminary and easy to break. Try it like this: $ sage -------------------------------------------------------- | SAGE Version 1.4, Build Date: 2006-10-05 | | Distributed under the GNU General Public License V2. | -------------------------------------------------------- experimental sage: ex1=axiom('x^%i') sage: ex1 %i x Type: Expression Complex Integer sage: ex1.integrate('x') %i log(x) x %e ------------- 1 + %i Type: Union(Expression Complex Integer,...) sage: exit The preliminary code for the Axiom interface is here: http://sage.math.washington.edu/home/page It is a patch to the latest 1.4 release of Sage. > > Were you able to distribute DoyenCDs at the conference? > I did discuss the DoyenCD during the last part of my talk (when you were scheduled to speak!). There was some interest but it was clearly not the focus of most of the people at this meeting. Most of the people there were Sage developers - not Sage users - and most were experienced with building and using Sage from scratch in the Linux environment. Given a need, they would also probably build Axiom in this manner. So a LiveCD is only of strategic interest as a means of making Sage (and other computer algebra software) more accessible to less experienced users. So in the end I did not distribute any copies of the CD. But perhaps that is a good thing since we should soon have the new version of the CD which includes Sage support in the Doyen wiki. Right? :-) Regards, Bill Page. _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
