dean moore wrote: > OK, there seems an interest in us relatively new folk contributing code > for SAGE. > Admirable. More than I get from M*cr*s*ft. Or Apple. Thanks. I mean it. > > Surfing Wikipedia, I came upon the animated graph at > < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotrochoid >, and thought, "Sounds like > a good project. Bet I can do that in SAGE" (see attached .gif, not the > same constants as the Wikipedia image). > > I coded, swore, googled, shook my fist at the computer, and posted a few > questions > to the Newbie Group that doesn't seem to exist anymore. And spent a lot > of time documenting the monstrosity, removing magic numbers & generally > cleaning up. > > Glanced at < http://sagemath.org/doc/html/prog/index.html >, indented my > loops > an extra space, -- obvious -- but unsure of other stuff. Added the > > - Copyright (C) 2007 Dean Moore < [EMAIL PROTECTED] > <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > ... > > boilerplate to the top -- perhaps a bit presumptuous on my part. Some > of the other coding conventions were confusing to me -- I wrote my > doctoral thesis in AMS-TeX, but the LaTex stuff left me lost. > > But is this just a nice learning project on my part, or is there a > demand for such > functionality in SAGE? Would people investigating, say, Ptolemaic > astronomy, > high school, college students/teachers find such worthwhile? Or would my > talents be better used elsewhere than animating relations, which is perhaps > some SAGE equivalent of picking flowers on a spring day? > > The code is such a monstrosity I don't care to here include it, -- > someone said > something about doing this -- but "published" it under the name > "Hypotrochoid" > at < https://www.sagenb.org/home/pub/1687/ >.
This is great stuff! I think it's a perfect place to post it. We really ought to set up a library of wonderfully documented examples of how to use Sage, something like the Maple application center or the Mathematica Demonstrations project. The current list of notebooks doesn't fill this need all the way because it is not organized or searchable (I don't think), and there are a lot of the published sagenb notebooks that contain one-off calculations that are not very helpful to someone trying to explore or learn how to use Sage. Stuff like the above worksheet should be easy to find and sort out from the other things. A wiki may be a perfect way to do this. People can add pointers from the wiki in certain categories to their published notebook page. Dean, you mentioned the frustration of trying to learn a new system. Was there anything that we could have done to make it easier (sorry about the unanswered posts to sage-newbie; we all kind of dropped the ball with keeping up with so many different mailing lists). Dean, I guess I should add that just last year, I was a newbie sage user as well. I felt how much people welcomed newcomers and cared about helping people get up to speed and I'm trying to pass that on now. In reality, the long-term survival of the project depends on attracting a strong support base of people who contribute and help in whatever way they can. The leaders in the Sage effort realize this and strongly support and go out of their way to do this and that is one of the big things that sold me on Sage. Jason --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-support URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
