On Dec 12, 2007 4:27 PM, Jaap Spies <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> William,
>
> I like this. It could be a good start for a blog!
OK, hint taken! I've made this blog for Sage-related stuff, and
made my first post based on that email:
http://sagemath.blogspot.com/
>
> Jaap
>
>
>
>
> William Stein wrote:
> > On Dec 12, 2007 3:22 PM, Thomas Keller <> wrote:
> >> Hi,
> >> I just saw the Dr. Dobb's article on SAGE. I will check it out, but I was
> >> wondering if you've looked at Octave?
> >> Why not join up with that team?
> >
> > Here's a list of reasons that Sage and Octave are and will remain to
> > very different
> > projects, and also why I didn't initially join up with the Octave team
> > when I started
> > Sage three years ago:
> >
> > (1) Octave doesn't do anything at all that is useful for any of my
> > personal research, at least
> > the research I was doing when I started Sage. I am a number
> > theorist / arithmetic geometer, who works with elliptic curves,
> > modular forms, prime numbers,
> > arbitrary precision arithmetic, and high precision numerical
> > computation. There is almost
> > zero overlap between anything I personally wanted to compute and
> > anything Octave does, or
> > even supports at a basic level. That's my personal reason.
> >
> > (2) Octave is designed primarily to be a Matlab clone, and having
> > programmed as a job
> > seriously in Matlab for one year as a graduate student, I did not get
> > the impression that
> > the Matlab language was nearly so beautiful, well designed,
> > expressive, etc., as Python,
> > especially when one is interested in writing code to do a huge range
> > of things -- networking,
> > web servers, GUI's, symbolic algebra, etc., none of which is numerical
> > computation. Since
> > Octave's, language-wise at least, seems to me to be to clone Matlab's
> > language, the
> > same issues apply there.
> >
> > (3) The goals for Sage are to provide a viable alternative to
> > "Magma, Maple, Matlab, and
> > Mathematica". The Magma system, which you might not have heard of, is
> > a beautiful
> > closed source commercial well-structured computer algebra system
> > developed at the
> > University of Sydney. For serious research mathematics in number
> > theory it utterly
> > blows away Maple, Mathematica, and Matlab. The entire design of Magma,
> > which is the result of several decades of hard worked by many people,
> > is completely
> > foreign to the design of Octave/Matlab/Maple/Mathematica, but actually
> > maps quite well to
> > the Python programming language. Trying to implement something like
> > Magma in the
> > context of Octave would be too hard given how much time I have.
> > To some extent similar remarks apply regarding
> > Maple and Mathematica -- to write a viable alternative to Maple or
> > Mathematica in
> > Octave would likely be very difficult -- especially because the Octave
> > language is really
> > meant primarily for numerical/matrix calculations rather than symbolic
> > algebra. Thus
> > I think it would be too difficult to accomplish the primary mission of
> > Sage using Octave.
> >
> > (4) At some point though, I had to chose the numerical component for
> > sage, since in
> > fact my more recent research interests had broadened
> > to more numerical things, and those of a lot of new Sage users (the
> > number of Sage
> > users increased by a huge amount in the last few months), were also
> > fairly numerical.
> > Given that I chose Python as the center of gravity for Sage, I had to
> > find something
> > that fit well with Python. The most natural choice is Scipy/Numpy, since it
> > is a Python library supported by a successful company funding its
> > development (http://www.enthought.com/), and having met the employees
> > of that company I
> > think it will stay successful. That said, I (and my student Josh
> > Kantor) had substantial
> > trouble -- which we eventually overcame through much hard work --
> > building Scipy from source on a wide range of platforms, so we tried very
> > hard
> > to make Octave serve as the numerical component of Sage. We found several
> > things:
> > (a) Octave takes quite a long time to build from source -- easily 5-10
> > times
> > as long as scipy. This is nearly a show stopper.
> > (b) Octave does not have a robust library mode. I.e., the only current
> > way to use Octave from Python is via a psuedo-tty. This rendered
> > Octave completely
> > unsuitable as the main numerical core of SAge, unless we wanted to
> > spend a massive
> > amount of time fixing up the experimental half-way Octave C-library
> > interface (we don't).
> > And, at the end of the day, Octave basically mainly wraps the same
> > libraries as
> > Scipy already wraps.
> > (c) Any user interested in Python and numerical computation already very
> > likely uses Scipy/Numpy, so trying to convince them to *switch* to using
> > Sage
> > and a shakie Octave interface would be futile.
> >
> > All that said, I think Octave is a great program (more below), and there is
> > a
> > Sage <--> Octave interface, see:
> >
> > sage: r = octave('rand(2)')
> > sage: r^2
> > 0.264001 0.336857
> > 0.198339 0.253094
> >
> > and I'm very glad Octave exists. It's incredibly useful for people
> > with Matlab programs
> > that need to run them but don't want to use Matlab. But for the
> > reasons listed
> > above Sage has much different ambitions than Octave:
> >
> > * Sage's goal is to be a viable alternative to Maple, Mathematica,
> > Magma, *and* Matlab* (not just Matlab, which is Octave's goal),
> >
> > * finally be the first major math software system to use a standard
> > mainstream programming language (e.g., Python) instead of a
> > custom language, and one that is very good at gluing together
> > distinct systems.
> >
> > * provide a home for and unified interface to the wide range of
> > incredibly
> > powerful special-purpose software that specialists in number theory,
> > combinatorics, algebraic geometry, and so on have written.
> > (Sage ships with at least 10 such programs...)
> >
> >
> > -- William
> >
> > > >
> >
>
>
--
William Stein
Associate Professor of Mathematics
University of Washington
http://wstein.org
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