On Aug 15, 12:58 pm, William Stein <[email protected]> wrote: > If somebody walked up to *you* and asked: "Is Sage now a viable > alternative to MATLAB?" what would you say?
Good question. If you consider "matrix algebra" as the core functionality of MATLAB, then I think Sage could very easily be a viable alternative, but is not there yet. I realize that MATLAB is more than just matrix algebra, but I am going to restrict my comments to that (important) area. I came from Mathematica, and have never been a MATLAB user. I did recently look at the MATLAB documentation very carefully, at a time when I was also in the NumPy/SciPy documentation frequently and also had my head in sage/matrix/matrix_double_dense.pyx regularly. With Jason Grout's NumPy backend supporting Sage matrices over RDF/CDF it is very straightforward to implement NumPy/SciPy functionality for various common operations, computations and decompositions. So there is little excuse for not exposing almost everything NumPy/SciPy do in this area, other than it is a pain in the *ss to doctest this numerical stuff across platforms when you do not control the underlying implementation. Off the top of my head, I would say we are 75% of the way to matching MATLAB on the big stuff, function-by- function. We have everything else you need - simple matrix operations (submatrices, transposes, etc, etc), all the usual functions (sine, cosine, exponential, etc), a user interface (the notebook). So all the surrounding bits and pieces are available (and possibly superior). The "ecosystem" is in place. We do a few things, thankfully very rarely, where we use exact algorithms for matrices with floating-point entries (like rank, or echelon form) and we shouldn't be. For those brought up doing things exactly (myself included) the approach and philosophy takes some time to get used to. I have a rant all composed on this subject from several months ago, but did not unleash it since I wasn't prepared to follow-up. I am very interested in working on all of this, as I would like to use both exact and inexact computations in a "second course" on linear algebra. Unfortunately, my extended period of time for exclusive Sage development is coming to an end (I'm writing my sabbatical final report today). So hear comes the thread-hijack - plenty to do - I have some patches posted and plenty of ideas for further work. Look at the bottom of the table at: http://wiki.sagemath.org/devel/LatexToWorksheet Rob -- To post to this group, send an email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
