Dear Sage and Sage-Combinat developers,
First of all, I'm sorry for the slightly of topic e-mail I sent this
morning. I didn't understand from the discussion that the issue we had in mind
was not to pickle and un-pickle an object in the *current* sage version, but
to un-pickle a object which was pickled with a *former* version of sage.
> Now, with the fundamentals progressively coming in (categories, basic
> data structures, species, integer lists generated lexicographically,
> LattE) the focus is now shifting. It is becoming essential to refactor
> the existing code to cleanly use those fundamentals before growing too
> much further. I very much hope that the refactoring process should
> allow for discarding at least one half of the code while
> simultaneously increasing the flexibility and thus the feature set.
I'd like to emphasize on that point. In Marne-la-Vallee's algebraic
combinatorics team, it's the third time that we start from zero the
construction of a large (ie: more than 100 000 lines of code) package. In my
opinion, one of the two main reason why the first one called ACE was dropped
is the following: it was designed as a set of complete finished and quite
polished "calculettes" (pocket computer) form computing in various algebras
(Symmetric Group algebras / Hecke Algebras / Symmetric Functions...) It's
modularity was very poor, partly due to the bad base language (MAPLE) which
lacks object programming paradigm. The second reason was that de development
model was wrong. The second package was MuPAD-Combinat. I think the reason why
we switch are clear for all of us, but I'd like to make some comparisons. ACE
was very hard to extend whereas MuPAD-Combinat was designed for it. In
MuPAD-Combinat we never manage to get ACE fully reimplemented, but if we had,
I seriously think that the size of the code would had been divided by at least
by a factor of 5. On the contrary, we had a lot more expressivity power which
allows to construct one of these "calculette" very easily. For the sort of
research we made at this time in Marne-la-Vallée, it has proven extremely
powerful.
> My *personal* point of view is that, at the current stage, the
> combinatorics stuff is still at its infancy, and refactoring should
> get the top priority. As such, I would put the following policy (until
> things stabilize seriously, probably in a couple months, maybe one year):
I completely agrees with Nicolas, but my voice is not to be taken
seriously: right now, I'm not a sage user. It still needs several feature
which are necessary for my research. I'd like to take the occasion to repeat
my thanks to Mike. Without him I would have never considered to switch to
sage. Nevertheless, if I try hard to avoid writing any new line of MuPAD, I
still use it for research.
Now I'd like to let the voice to the real users.
Cheers,
Florent
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