On 12/5/06, David Harvey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > On Dec 5, 2006, at 12:29 PM, William Stein wrote: > > > You know, honestly, the problem of how to express do Calculus with > > a computer algebra system is not exactly a new one. It's been > > to some degree completely and totally solved by Mathematica. > > Maybe the real discussion we should be having is how can we > > make a basic interface to SAGE for doing calculus that is very similar > > to mathematica's? Only if there is a strong technical reason why > > something is not possible in Python, should we even be having these > > discussions. Basically, before we continue going along the route > > suggested by you and Robert, I would like a very good justification > > for why Mathematica/Maple got it wrong (despite millions of users > > and two decades of polishing and work). Otherwise, I don't understand > > why we don't just do something similar to Mathematica. This reduces > > the learning curve for some people a lot, and means we spend time > > solving problems instead of coming up with a new design that is > > probably > > wrong anyways, then spending a lot of time testing it, only to find > > that it really doesn't work for various reasons. > > I agree with these sentiments. The only problem is that perhaps > Mathematica semantics differ considerably from Python's from the > ground up, and this would make it very difficult to have both in the > same interface. I haven't used Mathematica for a long time, but when > I did, I distinctly remember the feeling of never being quite sure > what the "type" of my objects was; whereas Python has a very strong > notion of type. But it could be simply that I hadn't had much > programming experience back then. > > I wish I could contribute more usefully to this discussion, I think > it's an extremely important one, because being able to do calculus is > critical to SAGE's mainstream acceptance. But I just don't have > enough familiarity with Mathematica/Maple. (Or calculus for that > matter. Crap I have to go and teach div/grad/curl in 60 minutes.) > > David
I agree as well. Any language issues aside, there's no reason at all to reinvent the wheel on this. However, there are some issues that we have do deal with that are no problem for maple or mathematica: > We have a serious design challenge which is > to make something that really does both calculus and serious math. I say > we face that challenge head on and find a good solution, even if it means > a lot of very hard thought. I like the challenge. I think a smooth transition between calculus and 'serious math' is key, or at the very least being able to naturally use both in the same session. While it will be nice for SAGE's calculus interface to be immediately available to Mathematica and Maple users with no learning curve, it is just as important that we minimize the learning curve for someone who knows calculus, but may not know any computer algebra language. It's been a while since I've used Mathematica myself. From what I recall, Mathematica handles basic calculus pretty well. I'm going to go refamiliarize myself with it a bit today... -- Bobby Moretti [EMAIL PROTECTED] --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
