William Stein wrote: > On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 9:54 PM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <[email protected]> > wrote: >> 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? > > Not directly. Matlab did *purchase* MuPAD fairly recently, and they > sell MuPAD as a "Symbolic Toolbox" addon. I used to use the Mupad > <---> Matlab symbolic toolbox thing a decade ago for a job I had once. > But core Matlab is very much numerically oriented.
Interesting. MuPAD had a "free as in beer" subset that was once distributed with the SciLab package, but nobody I know ever used MuPAD. You're the first. > What are some ideas you have about how we could make Sage easier for > _you_ (and people "like you") to learn? How did you learn R? I learned R by downloading it and reading the introductory manual that came with it. I have forgotten what release it was, but it was early 2000 when I did that. I now have most of the base books that go with R, the reference books for the packages I use heavily like "sm", "quantreg" and "rggobi", and a few other statistics books that have libraries associated in R/S. And I'm still learning things about it. R is an amazing achievement. As far as Sage is concerned, I think I just need to sit down with it and learn what's in it. I don't do a lot of discrete math, I don't do crypto, group or ring theory or any of the other "specialized" calculations that packages like Pari or Singular are good at. My main area these days is continuous-time Markov chains and related areas like process algebras and Petri nets. A good high-speed arbitrary-precision rational arithmetic package, Laplace transforms, and a programming language are about all I need. I can *almost* do everything in Ruby. :) -- 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
