I've been discussing Sage recently with a local computer science professor, who is now interested in contributing some code to Sage. I just sent him a long email explaining some code, but wrote the following paragraph too. I thought people might be interested in commenting (or Harald might be interested in putting it on the website :). Justin and Carl, I hope that I accurately described you as examples of professionals that are contributing.
I was trying to address the idea that Sage provides a great environment for a software engineering class or for individual students to learn how to develop software in a team. "I really think that Sage can give students a wonderful experience in developing in a large-scale, supportive, and rigorous environment. All code is peer-reviewed. All functions must be documented and unit-tested (and pass on a variety of platforms). Python is used as a base language, Mercurial is used as the source code revision system, and Trac is used to track all support/development issues; all of these tools are very capable and used in many other small and large-scale projects. The mailing lists are *extremely* supportive and responsive, as is the IRC channel. There are, I think, around 150 people that have contributed code directly to Sage, including many leaders in mathematics, as well as professionals (e.g., one main developer is a retired Apple kernel engineer, another works at machine vision company in Seattle, etc.), graduate students, and undergraduate students. There are releases about every 3-4 weeks, under the attitude of "release early, release often", so students could see their code in the real live software several times before the semester is over. Contributions of all sorts are heartily welcomed, but attention is paid to making sure that the system does not become bloated and disorganized. The mission statement, "Creating a viable free open source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica and Matlab", allows for a very wide variety of contributions. From a software engineering standpoint, Sage is a wonderful project to be engaged in." 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
