On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 9:42 AM, rjf <fate...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > On Jun 4, 9:22 am, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: > .... >> >> Give me a break. That's like asking: "How can one honestly claim, >> as a benefit of publishing proofs, that 'anyone can see the proof' >> when it appears that experts have difficulty even in reading already >> proved theorems?" > > I wouldn't claim that. > > Let us say that I published a paper that contained a proof. > > I would not add a postscript to the proof saying, > "Since anyone can see the proof, if it is wrong, any reader can > correct it." > > Now go back 4 lines and replace "proof" with "program".
One has a much better chance to fix a proof you can read than a proof you aren't allowed to see. > There are many statements about the open source programming paradigm > that > are probably inapplicable when the programs in question are > sufficiently > rarified that the number of people who understand them is quite small. > This can be for several reasons: it requires advanced mathematical > knowledge > to understand, or extreme breadth of (perhaps shallow!) knowledge. > An example of the latter may be the failure so far to bring up Sage > natively on Windows. We can run Sage natively on Windows. We haven't released publicly this yet, since it isn't sufficiently polished. Stay tuned. -- William Stein Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org -- 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
