>Another thing that comes across fairly clearly in the talk is that Sun >is planning to use Fortress as a way to create a large scientific >computing community just like Java was used to create a large "web >commerce" community. The marketing person in me can't help but think >that Axiom's algorithms would be very useful for helping to achieve >this goal.
<rant> Oh, please, not ANOTHER attempt. I made myself rather unpopular at the CalculusFormalLibre conference over this point. A meeting was held to decide whether there should be an effort to create a new computer algebra system. I pointed out that Axiom had been around for about 22 years. In that time it had a large number of contributors, roughly 300 man-years of research, and about 42 million dollars invested. It was one of the four large commercial systems along with Maple, Matlab, and Mathematica. (Axiom was not yet free at the time but I had been in private discussion with NAG about it). I did not believe (and still do not) that any new effort will get that level of sustained funding over so many years. It makes more sense to start from a prepared base. There are a large number of not-very-interesting technical issues that need to be re-solved if you start from scratch. It would be much more productive to spend any additional resource starting from a prepared base. Then researchers can add new algorithms and work on the mathematics rather than the language/porting/graphics/library/interpreter and all the other uninteresting-but-needed details. I'm watching Sage struggle over what is essentially a solved problem in Axiom, that is, how to handle coercion and still be efficient. That would be fine if it was a research attempt to define a theory detailing the full lattice of coercions based on category theory. That would be a lasting contribution to the field of computational mathematics and would create a much stronger foundation for everyone. Instead I'm watching what appears to be an ad-hoc war over dynamic lookup vs performance. Axiom achieves both, getting the dynamic lookup from the interpreter and performance from the compiler. Unfortunately Sage is python-based and does not have a compiler. So this is turning into a python vs cython debate which has NO long term benefits for the field. There are many, many more of these debates ahead (eg. noncommutative issues, OpenMath-like communication issues, non-pythonic type hierarchies, variable scoping rules, invalid object constructions (e.g. matrix of streams), simplification, etc.). None of the Sage discussions of ad-hoc solutions are likely to be of any real research interest or achieve long term advancement of the field. Work is being done to rewrite things like symbolic integration in python when Axiom contains correct, fast, and efficient code written by the people who invented the theory (Davenport, Trager, Bronstein, etc.). The Axiom code is well tested and sound. A python rewrite does not represent an advance. I do hope that Sage is successful, in whatever sense that might be taken, since it might expand the number of people who get interested in the computational mathematics field. But I have to say that I believe the effort would be much better spent concentrated on a major code base such as Axiom or Maxima. Clearly I have an interest in Axiom being chosen so my voice is highly biased and, therefore, quite suspect and worth ignoring. Despite that, I do believe I raise a valid point. Watching SUN pour 42 million dollars into climbing the same mountain that others have already climbed would be heartbreaking. </rant> Tim _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
