On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 07:51:31PM -0500, Kris Maglione wrote: > Don't be silly. There's nothing like a "suckless" CAS, at least > nothing remotely approaching the simplicity of suckless.org > software. Computer algebra and calculus are complex and > computationally intensive. They can't (and arguably shouldn't) be > simplified beyond a point. >
I tend to agree with this. > > Maxima is pretty much the gold standard among open source CASs. Sage > is a bit more featureful in some areas, but it's a ridiculously > huge, self-contained distro including an entire Python runtime, and > it pretty much requires that you use the web interface to do > anything useful. Sympy is the basis of Sage, and it works, but it's > a bit slow and lacks a few features. > Sage is indeed ridiculously huge and will probably get bigger as libraries from other areas of mathematics get added. However, it is simply not true that it "requires you to use the web interface to do anything useful". I have been using Sage extensively for teaching and research for the past two years and I spend 95% of my time in the command-line interface. I only use the Sage notebook (i.e. the web interface) when I need to use graphics in a class, or during talks (most students, but also a lot of mathematicians seem to get a blank stare when they look at the command line). > > Use Maxima, try Sage, but if you want suckless, prepare to be > disappointed by the latter. Again, I agree that Sage is nowhere near suckless. And it still lacks many features that people want, although it's still a fairly young project insofar as CAS's go (5 years), so I'm certain that lots of new features will be added. In the end, it depends on what you want to do with your CAS. If you want something very precise, there is good specialised software around (Pari was already mentioned for number theory, GAP is the way to go for group theory, Macaulay2 for algebraic geometry, Singular for commutative algebra, mpmath for special functions, R for statistics, etc.) Best, Alex -- Alex Ghitza -- Lecturer in Mathematics -- The University of Melbourne -- Australia -- http://www.ms.unimelb.edu.au/~aghitza/
