On Mon, Nov 26, 2007 at 02:31:31PM +0100, Ondrej Certik wrote: > > (In reality, I think that sympy and sage should simply merge. However, I > > don't know enough about sympy to know how feasible that is. I put this in > > parenthesis, because I fear it's kind of a demeaning thing to say. I don't > > mean it that way though. It just feels like they are natural complements of > > each other. The whole would be greater than the sum of it's parts.) > > The problem with SAGE is that it is huge. And for many people it is > just too huge. > So finding ways to create SAGE more modular is the way to go imho. And > it will happen - > the notebook and maxima wrappers will eventually be released > separately. So I myself > definitely don't want to create something, so that users would need to > choose - either SAGE or > sympy. That would be very, very bad.
Well, if I had to pick a nasty point to sage I would agree that it's huge-ness is seriously annoying. The slow import of "sage.all" really kills the pleasure for writing python programs which you want to use from bash, but I realize that I'm a bit unusual to actually use it that way. I would love more modularity, but I'm not convinced it's possible. I mean, this huge-ness is a wart in many ways, but quite frankly I've not seen any other mathematics package which I would look forward to using for a lifetime of mathematics (at all levels). I say that statement for mathematica as well as OSS alternatives (just try writing a mathematica script to call from bash!). I think the hugeness might just be an acceptable trade-off since making modular software is much more difficult to make enjoyable to use. I am wondering though what kind of support for matrices and polynomials (for examples) you might envision with sympy. I see that you currently have support listed for these things, but if it's pure python the sage equivalents are going to be much faster. It seems that you could gain so much by sharing these goals with sage. On the flip side though, maxima is a gigantic ill-tempered beast to work with and we really need a symbolic alternative -- sympy seems just the thing. I think sage's symbolic side should be strong enough that we really shouldn't have to break out the special polynomial declarations unless you are doing something very special purpose. This might require a very very smart symbolic engine to detect when it is working with polynomials and use polynomial algorithms behind the scenes instead of more generic symbolic ones. I think if we could pull that off, then even the number theorists might find themselves working with the symbolic expressions. This would be a huge step towards mathematica level friendliness imo. I think I might be throwing this thread on a tangent though. Sorry. -- Joel --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
