On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 3:11 AM, Jean-Pierre Flori <jpfl...@gmail.com> wrote: > Let's replace Python by Julia :p > > http://lavieestmaloptimisee.blogspot.fr/2015/03/les-informaticiens-meprisent.html?view=classic
Oops, April 1 isn't until tomorrow [1] ?! [1] http://sage-devel.narkive.com/p7EcpMPd/python-and-lisp Regarding: On Tuesday, March 31, 2015 at 12:11:34 PM UTC+2, Jean-Pierre Flori wrote: > And that Sage as it is written by mathematicians looks very amateuristic to a > computer scientist. The specific points in the blog post might be (who knows -- I'm arguing with google translated french): - "The interfaces between packages was by strings which made 10 ^ 6 times slower than what we got on Mathematica." So computer scientists never use strings? (Yes, some things in Sage are slower than in Mathematica, and some are much faster.) By creating pexpect interfaces initially, we were able to establish an API and build up things on top of it (e.g., compute the irreducible components of a variety). Then later we wrote C library interfaces to many of these same components, which migrate to use that new interface, maintaining tests, etc. This sort of careful strategic iterative development, which easily parallelizes to a large number of people and gets big projects (GAP, Singular, PARI) to work together, rather than compete, is not amateuristic -- it's very sensible. Of course, often I feel I'm the only person in the world who believes this; maybe that's why there wasn't a Sage before Sage. - "The Windows version installs a Linux virtual machine." - This is partly due to the fact that it is an open-source project, led by mathematicians and that funding is somewhat limited. R-Evolution was a company set up by academics with one of the main goals to port just R to Windows properly. They raised about $40 million in funding, and eventually Microsoft just bought them this year (see http://vator.tv/news/2015-01-23-microsoft-buys-revolution-analytics-for-big-data). When we were first working on the Windows port of Sage (back in 2008) we met with the R-evaluation guys and they told us about how Microsoft was paying them millions to work on the port. Porting Sage fully natively to Windows would be at least as difficult as R (as R is just one of the many (and smaller) components of Sage). Sage has basically no funding in comparison with this. Anyways, "somewhat limited" is an understatement. Our budget is less than 1% of something like Mathematica (in fact, right now I have $0 in NSF support, since NSF rejected the last Sage grant proposal). - But honestly, as a computer scientists it makes you cry. Well I'm sure Sage has made many mathematicians cry too. Certainly me. - Sage Development (at least initially) was provided in part by undergrads and they had to refuse contributions... Some undergraduates are extremely good programmers, often quickly become graduate students, etc. We refuse contributions because we have a referee process, just like a journal refuses contributions. -- All that said, Julia seems really exciting. If people write major packages of functionality in Julia that people doing mathematics really need, and is better than what is already in Sage, we could consider adding Julia to Sage... So far, the demand-from-end-users scale hasn't tipped in that direction. Many algorithms in computational pure mathematics are very, very deep. Implementing major algorithms (at least in arithmetic geometry) can take year(s) working on a relatively stable foundation, which itself can take many years to build up, even with an ideal programming language. So even if Julia were "perfect" right now, it might be a while until it has the foundations and depth to implement say "ideal theory in quaternion algebras over number fields". I continue to be impressed by Magma... -- William -- William (http://wstein.org) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
