On Sep 19, 2009, at 10:08 PM, Tom Boothby wrote: > On Sat, Sep 19, 2009 at 4:47 PM, Bjarke Hammersholt Roune > <bjarke.ro...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> People have been writing mathematics software for a long time and so >> people have been accumulating experiences about good ways and bad >> ways >> to do things. I'm wondering how much Sage development is informed by >> that experience and however much it is, I think it is worthwhile to >> think about how to increase that. Is this something that has been >> discussed here? >> >> Given some feature, how to find out what experiences other people >> have >> had in implementing it before? One way is to have the people with >> those experiences directly involved in developing Sage or at least >> have them on sage-devel. A second is to identify these people and ask >> them what they think. A third is to examine other systems and see >> what >> kinds of advantages and disadvantages their designs entail (open >> source systems allows to read the code, too). A fourth is to search >> the literature for anything relevant. An with all of these except >> that >> first is that they delay development by adding steps beyond coding >> the >> first seemingly reasonable thing that comes to mind. That is both >> good >> and bad. >> >> I thought to open this topic here because of a recent discussion on >> sage-flame, and I'm hesitant to do so since it has the potential to >> generate lots of talk to no benefit. > > IMO, what happens on sage-flame should stay on sage-flame.
I disagree :) Actually, this topic should probably still stay on sage-flame, but sometimes things are brought up that are more pertinent to discuss here. And, to answer the original posters question, yes, often people go to great lengths exploring past and competing ideas before deciding how to do things, but not to the extent of parallelizing development (perfect is the enemy of good). - Robert --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
