Em Seg, 2009-02-02 às 15:56 -0800, Roman Pearce escreveu: > A new version of Maple is only released every year, and there are lots > of people who expect their 10 year old code to run. It's almost a > Microsoft-like situation. And since people have to pay for upgrades > there's an entirely different dynamic. Many people skip releases and > will only upgrade if there's something new that interests them. In a > way it makes sense. Maple is a 25 year old product, so any change - > no matter how big - is evolutionary. The developers need to minimize > the hassle that this causes for users, because for many people Maple > is just a tool that they don't want to be bothered by. Sage doesn't > have this problem because it is a young project with a smaller, mostly > enthusiast user base. You should break everything that's wrong while > you can :)
I believe Sage is a direct contrast to that above. Sage releases often (often enough that some users skip *many* releases, like I've seen people talking about sage 3.0.X series). Since Sage is freely available, there's not much users can rant, specially since mabshoff is working (really hard) to make available older versions of Sage. Specially for this reason, it's possible for a book to publish some code and specify Sage's version, and in some years possibly a user will be able to download the older Sage and run the code. Of course since Sage evolves much faster, it's also possible that the code will not run on current versions, but I think that stalling development in favor of backwards compatibility must have a limit or we risk losing some of what makes Sage that special. If a user wants to use a new Sage feature with old code, I think it should be left to the user to choose a compromise between breaking the code and using the new feature (IF the code breaks, which is not always). Ronan --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
