I fully agree with David. I started using Mathematica during my PhD project, when the equations I was dealing with just became too complex to be dealt with using paper and pencil. I must say that I would not have been able to finish my PhD without such a software. I was very glad to find out that the Mathematica licences were very affordable for a student and got one after the intial trial period. The problem with probably any proprietary software is that they do aim at your money and they will squeeze you as much as they can in the long run. Having created a large amount of code in Mathematica, I faced the situation of having to buy a non-student licence for my postdoctoral research in order to use any of that code for my further research. Luckily, my research grant allowed for that, and this investment was still lower than the time needed to get used to another software. However, when it came to collaborating with a technician, I would have to buy a second licence, at which stage I found out that the licence price went up by 50% within a week! This made me realise what a dangerous situation one can put oneself if tying oneself to a proprietary software for research. I am now convinced that the time and effort needed to work out SAGE is well worth it and will pay out big time in the long run.
After this experience, I find it irresponsible to force any students to use Mathematica or Matlab or any other proprietary software. Any time the student invests into writing useful pieces of code can be a waste if the student is not be able to afford the licence in the future. For me, this is the major step ahead that Sage has compared with Mathematica and the likes. This gap will never be closed unless Mathematica becomes free software :). So, having this huge advantage over Mathematica already, we should all work together to make SAGE the free software that can replace any commercial mathematical software. There are tasks that Mathematica and perhaps other proprietary programs do better than SAGE, but it sounds like SAGE is catching up. I think that comparisons between SAGE and other software are very useful to see the potential for improvements and also see the progress made. Community involvement is very important and therefore we should also put a priority on minimising the intitial effort needed to get started with SAGE. New users always estimate the cost/benefit ratios for adopting different software, and commercial software developers are very good at making the intial steps easy and letting the user get to the first benefits early. I think the SAGE developers have done a tremendous work in this direction already, so let's keep at it. Stan On Jul 14, 1:10 am, David Philp <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 14/07/2008, at 8:06 AM, Dr. David Kirkby wrote: > > > On Jul 13, 10:42 pm, Harald Schilly <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > >> You forget one point (for me the probably biggest one) - the > >> community. Especially around matlab you have a wide range of "open > >> source" (public domain, do what you want. ..) code on the web, spread > >> over many websites. So, if you need some functionality, you can get > >> it > >> quite easily. > > > On BIG BIG problem I feel with Mathematica is Wolfram try to control > > the community far too much. > > It's more than control of community. They take the "proprietary" in > software to the next level, to the point that one cannot > satisfactorily use it as a platform because it is too locked down. > > Wolfram's failure to value to "the freedom to study" and "the freedom > to tinker" mean that I have not been able to get the information I > wanted. And re-discovering the same bug... "the freedom to > redistribute your changes" saves a lot of time in the long run. > Though the icing on the cake was twice being left without a license. > > I am at the point where I don't care how good Mathematica is, I will > not lock myself into it for another project. > > D > > ================================== > David J Philp > Postdoctoral Fellow > National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health > Building 62, cnr Mills Rd & Eggleston Rd > The Australian National University > Canberra ACT 0200 Australia > > T: +61 2 6125 8260 > F: +61 2 6125 0740 > M: 0423 535 397 > W:http://nceph.anu.edu.au/ > > CRICOS Provider #00120C --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
