Thank you all for your feedback.
I agree that maintaining anoher version of Sage is probably spreading current resources too thin. I was asking to see if this was indeed the case. On the other hand, an engineering and physics oriented Sage could help boost Sage and bring in more resources from a largely untapped and enthusiastic audience. We would be competing more directly with Mathematica in particular, and other packages (MATLAB, etc.) in general, and making alot of waves and getting more attention that way. We could start simply by packaging a version of Sage that is smaller and drops most of the parts that are not widely used by most applied scientists and engineers, and emphasizes other packages and capabilities found in MATLAB for example. Documentation would necessarily have to be written or adapted with applied scientists in mind, and an aggressive promotion campaign among users of commercial computation software would be necessary. This version of Sage would be based on the main version, but would be a subset of it for simplicity's sake, more or less, with some optional packages treated as standard. It would be important not to include packages that have overlapping functionality, but choose only one of them. The distribution must be kept relatively small both for size and to keep it less confusing to a newbie. More integration would come with time. One great "selling" feature would be Cython, which provides the possibility to achive high computation speeds coupled with a nice and clean programming language. This is a big consideration for engineers and applied scientists and it is noteworhy that Python already has a growing user base among them. With Scilab we can even offer a MATLAB- like language as an option or as part of a mixed environment. Symbolic capabilties can be handled by a subset of the packages already offered (or soon to be offered) by Sage. I know what you are going to say: "Hazem, whya don't you do it?" I would love to, but honestly my time does not permit, even if I knew how to do it. I will keep it i mind, though. We can advertise for volunteers to take over and run the project, at least. best regards, Hazem On Mar 22, 9:45 pm, Tim Lahey <[email protected]> wrote: > On Mar 22, 2009, at 9:37 PM, Minh Nguyen wrote: > > > > > I don't think that maintaining another version of Sage is the way to > > go at the moment, since many developers have enough on their hands and > > little time to implement them. What I think is appropriate is to write > > a Sage interface to your favourite physics/engineering/numerical > > system, package your interface as an spkg, and announce your spkg on > > the sage-devel mailing list. A list of current spkg can be found at > > In my mind, what's generally necessary for engineering purposes is > a) examples of Sage used for engineering and b) consistency across the > various interfaces. Right now, one pretty much has to choose if you're > going to work with polynomials or with symbolics. It would be nice if > you could take a polynomial you've defined with Pynac, use the fast > polynomial routines and go back to the Pynac routines for the other > operations. Plus, there hasn't been a way to do integration with the > Pynac symbolics. > > Cheers, > > Tim. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
