William Stein wrote: > On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 4:59 PM, rjf <[email protected]> wrote: >> You are of course welcome to believe this, but the major competition >> for Mathematica >> is probably not Sage, but Matlab. > > For many engineering applications Matlab blows Mathematica out of the > water, and I wouldn't even consider Mathematica competition. For > many applications in pure mathematics -- hobbyists, education, > research, combinatorics, number theory, etc. -- I think that > Mathematica is vastly better than Matlab. Apples and Oranges.
Isn't Matlab, like the open source Octave, SciLab and FreeMat "knock-offs", a "purely numeric" langauge? They're great tools for easy interactive computing, but do they do *symbolic* calculation? I have never used any of them. I do most of my numeric work in R and have for many years. As an aside, there is a package in the R CRAN repository that interfaces with the open source symbolic math package Yacas. > In the US academic education environment I think your statement above > agrees 100% with what I've seen. > However, I expect that is not the environment Michael is talking about > or that the new Mathematica $300 "Home Version" license is aimed at. I'm not familiar with that version. Is that the "branding" -- a "home version" of Mathematica? Personally, as a working applied mathematician, I have not actually bought a licensed symbolic math tool since Derive 6, which was clocking in at a list price of $200US IIRC when TI stopped selling it. When I need symbolic capabilities now, I use wxMaxima most of the time, which has a "Derive-like" UI and has the stuff I care about, like Laplace transforms, built in. But clearly Sage, which includes R, is going to be my platform of choice once I learn how to use it. -- M. Edward (Ed) Borasky I've never met a happy clam. In fact, most of them were pretty steamed. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
