I just sent this to William, when I meant to send it to sage-devel.
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: David Kirkby <david.kir...@onetel.net> Date: 17 February 2011 07:39 Subject: Re: [sage-devel] Rapid growth in Python popularity To: William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> On 17 February 2011 07:05, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 3:41 PM, Dr. David Kirkby >> According to TIOBE's stats I'd be better learning Lisp than .NET, yet there >> are more than 500 times as many jobs on Monstir mentioning .NET compared to >> Lisp. > > You seem to not realize that C# is the primary .NET language. It is > *number 6* in the TIOBE ranking is C#. Yes, I did not realise that. >> Note Mathematica is nowhere to be found. I have seen the odd jobs on Monstir >> where Mathematica skills were desirable or needed, but they have been very >> few. There are none at the minute. This is why I have some difficulty in >> believing the claims from Wolfram Research about the number of users in >> industry. The web site gives the impression Mathematica is used a lot in >> industry, but that does not seem to be backed up by the number of job >> adverts mentioning the tool. > > It is indeed surprising that Mathematica is not on the list, since > Maple and Matlab both are, and they are clear that they do track > Mathematica. Thus it must rank below 100. Doing a search on google > for Yes, which I think is a pretty good argument for not bothering to learn it from an employment point of view. It seems very common in academia. But outside academia, I am less convinced it is useful skill to have. That is worth pointing out to students who might feel they would rather use a professional tool like Mathematica, rather than a free one like Sage. I know MATLAB skills are quite highly sought after > +"mathematica programming" > > gives a mere 31,000 results (compared to almost a million for Python, > about 40,000 for Maple, and about 230,000 for Matlab). Yes, MATLAB is very common in industry. It is pretty much a de facto standard in industry. > Just for fun, here's what the TIOBE-using-only-google results are for > our niche world of math software: > > language hits for +"language programming" > > Octave 8320 > Sage 3180 > GAP 2780 > Singular 2090 > Axiom 1150 > Scilab 863 > Maxima 818 > Magma 566 > Pari 334 > Kash 10 > Macaulay2 3 > Fricas 3 > OpenAxiom 0 > > > NOTE: Looking at results, GAP has way more false positives than Sage, > since "gap" is a common word that can occur in the context of > programming, e.g. "Bridging the Gap: Programming Sensor Networks with > applications" is on the first page. > > William I would expect Sage has a lot of false positives too, due to the accounting package. Dave -- 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
