I found the tone of this email a little inappropriate but will try to reply in a polite and I hope civil way. IMHO, it is very important to place a high value on this email list as a space which one can find encouraging and inspiring discussion of the development of mathematical algorithms. Perhaps some of the developers are old war-horses, who wear their battle-scares from flamewars with pride, but others are just very bright students who are inspired to help and learn. This type of tone doesn't help them and potentially can scare them away. I hope people will please take that into account when posting.
My replies, for what they are worth, are below. On Wed, May 28, 2008 at 10:04 AM, rjf <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > On May 27, 11:22 pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >> Richard, I didn't receive this note. Perhaps you can re-send it? Though, I >> should say: this topic toes the line between fact and religion. I'm >> interested to hear your thoughts, but I will tire of the topic quickly, and >> I assume that much of sage-devel will, too. Perhaps you could start a blog >> and people can read about it there? >> >> --tom >> >> On Tue, 27 May 2008, rjf wrote: >> >> > See the response to a small part of this in a separate thread on open- >> > source and proofs (unless the moderator removes that message.). I'm a moderator and the only messages I have ever removed was porn/spam which somehow got through. AFAIK, we don't remove messages which we might not completely agree with. >> >> > I joined sage-devel some time ago, but as [EMAIL PROTECTED], and I >> > haven't figured out how to rejoin it as [EMAIL PROTECTED] >> >> > If you want the FULL response as sent to Tom, you can ask him or me; I >> > asked him to forward it to sage-devel but he, perhaps wisely, >> > declined :) >> >> > The new thread is, I hope, of interest. >> >> > RJF > > ........................... > Here is what I sent to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" and was not > forwarded to sage-devel, apparently because Tom did not receive it. > Could it be that having been rejected by sage-devel it was not sent on > to other recipients? well, no matter. Now recall that William has > tried to call a moratorium on messages to/from me on this topic, and I > am not terribly interested in continuing it beyond others' interest in > responding. Nevertheless, here is the lost mail from Monday. > <snip> > > The goal of >> Sage is not to provide a transparent interface to these >> systems (though I'm often surprised at how well the notebook >> performs in this respect), but to be a cohesive system that >> uses the best of each system we include. > > ... snip ... re open source equivalent for Magma >> >> Every single one of the above fails on the Magma requirement, >> at the very least. >> > > I really don't care about Magma. I know that some mathematicians do. > This rather vague statement I think might signal a different between philosophies. Mathematicians I think agree that applications are great but that to create good and useful mathematics often starts by understanding an exploiting general mathematical principles. You and many others start with a real-world problem and try to solve it. Both approaches have their merits. This reminds me of a story I read in which the Queen of England asked Maxwell what good electricity was (which has just been discovered at the time). He replied, "Your majesty, what good is a baby?" May or may not be a true story but I think illustrates the difference in philosophies. > > Well, to say that Sage uniquely provides a viable free (etc) > alternative to Mathematica, > and then to admit that Sage calls Maxima, a viable free (etc) program > as the principal alternative to Mathematica, > suggests that there is a certain insincerity to the claim that Sage is > UNIQUE in providing that alternative.. free etc. > > After all, Maxima is already free, open-source etc, and just as much > an alternative. It seems to me that this discussion can be summarized that you don't like the statement that one of SAGE's goals is to be a " viable free (etc) alternative to Mathematica, ...". That is fine. It is your opinion. William Stein likes that statement. You don't. He explained why he likes it and you've explained why you don't. However, it seems to be more of an argument over marketing hype rather than SAGE development, isn't it? Or are you trying to point out a specific decision of the SAGE development team that you think is both (a) based on this goal, (b) a bad decision? If you are saying something to the effect "I think you should spend more time on X than Y" then I am missing the point and would be interested in a clarification. > >> >> some ranting deleted... >> >>.... Are you actually criticizing us for porting >> other projects to previously unsupported platforms? Is this >> "standing on the toes of giants"? Oh, this must be *such* an >> inconvenience to people, that we're making their code work >> better on more platforms! > > No, I am not criticizing you for porting your own code or even others' > to other platforms. > But it seems absurd that (for example) you reject Axiom, which has > many nice features and runs > nearly everywhere, free, open-source, AFAIK because you have some > political/philosophical disagreement with it. > Instead of standing on Axiom's shoulders, you stand on its toes. This > is, from a technical standpoint, > simply shameful. > I hope that is perfectly clear now. I'm not sure what you mean by "reject Axiom". (a) If by Axiom, you mean Tim Daly's fork, then the statement "runs nearly everywhere" is AFAIK misleading. (b) If by Axiom you mean Fricas or OpenAxiom then those are relatively recent and the decision to use Maxima over Axiom was made before their creation. (c) In any case, rejecting Axiom is not how I would characterize things and we are extremely grateful to Bill Page for helping Fricas work with SAGE. Possibly with more work, Axiom would be part of SAGE, but that is a SAGE community decision. (d) I personally think Axiom+forks is a great piece of software. > >> >> > * Instead of finding a remedy to some bug in Maxima or Axiom, or add >> > features that provide value beyond that available in Maple >> or Mathematica, >> > or Magma or Matlab, staff will be devoted to fulfilling an >> essentially >> > political statement about free speech. >> >> Naw. Free speech has nothing to do with it. It's about >> proof: you can't prove a result with Mathematica, since one >> can't readily inspect the source. > > This is simply naive bullshit. > You assume that seeing the source code is either necessary or > sufficient for a proof. Can you prove that? > > Read the paper by Demillon,Lipson, Perlis, about proofs and social > processes. I thnk this is a misunderstanding. I've heard your arguments before and I think I know what Tom is trying to say. It is simply that research and development of mathematical algorithms, at least in the academic community, is much easier if the code is FOSS as opposed to proprietary. Even if the code is "public" but not FOSS, then that can potentially cause problems since copyright laws can restrict distributing modifications. I think his point has nothing to do with the issues discussed in the paper you cited (not that the paper isn't interesting to read, but it just isn't very relevant). <snip> > RJF > > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
