On 5/7/20 8:45 AM, kcrisman wrote:
>
> Again, I think it is not necessarily the case that users of
> Sage-the-software - say, in a CoCalc-provided notebook as a student -
> necessarily know how to "search a bunch of files for a string" or even
> know that there is such a thing.
Anyone who wants to search the source code for a string probably knows
that source code and strings both exist, and that one can be searched
for the other. I believe in the user who knows nothing, but I don't
believe that he's interested in search_src() to begin with. (This is the
sort of thing I mean by a peculiar set of disabilities.)
> On Mac most ordinary users probably
> just use the Spotlight function, which searches the entire system. If
> you've ever searched for Sage stuff using that, you will know it is not
> super friendly (and then you have to wait for the system to open up
> Xcode to read the files, and it finds .c files, .py, .pyc, .pyx with the
> same string...).
>
> And even that doesn't work in a notebook you aren't hosting or on Sage
> cell server, obviously, and again many users may not even know there is
> a directory structure at all. This is not a "highly peculiar set of
> disabilities" - rather, the skill set of people on sage-devel is a
> "highly peculiar set of abilities", even among people doing math on a
> regular basis.
These are both valid concerns. I disagree only in the way we should
address them. Instead of a magic function with a non-standard name that
only kind-of works and that we have to maintain forever, I think these
two cases are better served by some documentation:
1. SageMath is an open source project, and all of its code is freely
available <link to source code>. The code can even be browsed
online <link to github/gitlab>.
2. The source code for SageMath is mostly python, and if you want to
see how something works, just search through sage's python source
files for it, and read the code.
3. Here are a few examples showing you how to search through files
on some common operating systems...
4. For advanced users, here are some incantations that will do the
job quickly from within a sage terminal or notebook...
The fact that sage is just a bunch of files in directories simplifies
the mental model, compared to a search_src() incantation that runs in a
web browser and returns something from somewhere. The ability to "do
what you would normally do" is similarly comforting to the people who
normally do it. The rest are better served by some pointers on how to
use their operating system's abilities.
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