On 2/9/12 4:44 PM, William Stein wrote:
On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 2:34 PM, Jason Grout<jason-s...@creativetrax.com> wrote:
On 2/9/12 4:28 PM, Michael Orlitzky wrote:
I think if we could get rid of a few magic commands in favor of 'mv',
'cp', and 'ln', it would make the process seem less daunting.
+1. And then the new user that is learning how to do sage has skills that
transfer elsewhere.
That's a slippery slope, but tempting when you get so used to UNIX
from years of use, that it all seems trivial to you. Maybe you
don't teach classes that involve a component on Sage development, but
I do, and 95% (or more) of students don't have even the slightest clue
about anything regarding UNIX. Making them learn UNIX at the same
time as Sage development is a recipe for confusion, and I don't think
it is necessary.
What we really need to expand the contributor base substantially at
this point is "total magic", so people can fully develop on Sage
without ever having to use command such as mv, cp, hg, and ln, and of
course this should be a web-based development environment.
Exactly what I've been thinking. The barrier for very new contributors
needs to be lower (i.e., you don't even have to install Sage; everything
is over the web, from editing to submitting patches), and the bar for
serious developers can be raised slightly to incorporate more standard
skills (which in itself will attract more serious developers, if it is
easy for them to get up to speed by using their standard development
skillset.)
Jason
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