Hi William, That is interesting. Although my take on that is following Matthias's proposal, they will just use one (or more) part of Sage as a Python library. So if they switch, in effect they will still be dropping Sage. I don't see Sage as having its own custom language other than some small syntactic sugar items (although I guess the ^ for ** is a big one for people switching to Python), but it does sit within its own environment (which has its pros and cons IMO). It is slightly annoying to bring everything into that environment, but I feel that we can get a bit of a smoother user experience this way.
I guess some of it comes down to what our target audience is. Even if we were just a normal Python package and just do "from sage import *", I think Sage would have a hard time competing against things like NumPy and matplotlib for those first year courses. They are currently too broadly used in many fields/industries, so universities will want to emphasize those. However, Sage is better equipped to do the more specialized math courses and research based computations. I don't think we have spent nearly enough time making our own set of teaching tools to compete; mostly that has been split off/overtaken by the Jupyter notebooks or in the libraries we build off of. I think we would need to have more of an influence in industry jobs to bring more universities around to saying "start Python, then do 'from sage.all import *'." Perhaps this is the question that I am looking for an answer for, "What is Sage (after modularization)?" Best, Travis On Friday, June 16, 2023 at 8:23:01 AM UTC+9 William Stein wrote: > Hi Sage Devs, > > As further motivation for this discussion of "Modularization project: > I. The goals", here is a quote from a discussion just now (with > permission) from Eric Deeds, who is the vice chair for Life Sciences > Math Courses and Professor of Integrative Biology and Physiology at > UCLA: > > "I think we may also switch to using Python with libraries, rather > than SageMath since Python is much more widely used." > > At UCLA they currently use SageMath (the full environment and > language) with about 3K students per year, and are considering > switching from Sage to normal Python, since sage is its own custom > language and environment, which isn't exactly the Python language, > etc. This is motivation for modularization of sage, since there is > substantial functionality in Sage, e.g., "plotting vector fields", > which they would like to use still. Of course, I did explain how it > is possible to use normal Python and import sage via "from sage.all > import ...". However, properly supporting using Sage from Python like > any other Python citizen would be even better, and that's something > that would result from the project Matthias is spearheading. > > -- William > > On Mon, Jun 12, 2023 at 4:54 PM Nathan Dunfield <nat...@dunfield.info> > wrote: > > > > On Monday, June 12, 2023 at 2:58:18 PM UTC-4 Matthias Koeppe wrote: > > > > What parts of Sage does SnapPy use? > > > > > > Primarily the various rings/fields, including matrices over them and > basic linear algebra. Specifically, interval arithmetic > (Real/ComplexIntervalField), polynomial rings (in several variables, > including Laurent polynomials), number fields, and the basic rings ZZ, QQ, > GF, RealField, ComplexField, etc. Also, the ptolemy submodule uses Sage for > groebner_basis calculations. I suspect most of what we use would be part of > any initial pip-installable version of the Sage library. Right now, in the > stand-alone apps we backstop some of Sage's functionality (e.g. arbitrary > precision floats) with CyPari, which is itself an example of part of Sage > being modularized. > > > > Best, > > > > Nathan > > > > -- > > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "sage-devel" group. > > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send > an email to sage-devel+...@googlegroups.com. > > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sage-devel/4b14371d-b528-4b43-b350-5920259c88e1n%40googlegroups.com > . > > > > -- > William (http://wstein.org) > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sage-devel/91a2c3b6-a018-4931-890f-ce3ce5ced8b8n%40googlegroups.com.
