On Jan 27, 2007, at 4:49 PM, William Stein wrote:

> But overall, do you think this is useful and a good addition
> to SAGE?

Holy friggin **WOW**.

This makes it so insanely easy for someone new to start learning how  
to use SAGE. It's hard enough to expect people to work out that they  
are supposed to get the documentation up in one window and a notebook  
in another window :-)... let alone download and compile the bloody  
thing. This just changes the game completely. I think this is the  
first time I've really appreciated the power of the notebook interface.

The first five minutes of using this was like the first five minutes  
I ever used wikipedia. My mind just boggled at the concept.

We need a front-and-centre "Interactive Tutorial" link from the main  
SAGE site, going straight to the tutorial. And it really needs to say  
something like "hey you -- yeah you! You can actually *run* SAGE  
commands, right from this page! Use Shift-ENTER.". It's not at all  
obvious that you can do that, if you haven't seen it before. I even  
think it might be worth totally rewriting the tutorial with this new  
interactivity in mind.

Do the big guns have anything like this on their websites? Maple  
doesn't seem to have any online documentation at all, apparently you  
actually have to buy it. Mathematica has something called  
"webmathematica" but it seems pretty cowardly compared to this.

I have a feeling we are soon going to need a dedicated machine to  
handle these public notebooks and the interactive documentation.

David


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