Hi!
On 19 Jun., 18:50, Pierre <[email protected]> wrote:
> thanks for this. You might be amused by what my colleague said about
> SAGE, when we were talking about whether or not using numpy:
>
> "SAGE is like the British train system: you have to worry about which
> company to use."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Sage's mission "creating a UNIFORM
viable alternative to Ma*"? Then I think this critique is something
that needs to be taken very serious: It shows that there are potential
users that have the impression that Sage is not uniform at all. I
believe it is a wrong impression.
A possible reply to your colleague:
Of course, there are a lot of different pieces of software in the
background. One strength of Sage is that it provides a uniform way of
communicating with all these pieces of software, namely via Python/
Cython. This is like a good travel agent: You say that you want to go
from London to Liverpool, and the travel agent gives you the cheapest
or fastest or most comfortable connection: You don't need to worry
that there are various train companies in the background. (Also you
don't need to go via Paris if you want to travel from Strasbourg to
Calais -- sorry, I couldn't resist to mention a detail that I found
odd when traveling in France :)
Also of course, Sage isn't a perfect travel agent yet. There is some
functionality (here: of numpy) that can be used when working with
Sage, but the user needs to know where to find the functionality; this
is not uniform. If those examples pop up, I guess the natural way is
to open a ticket, submit a patch, and then another functionality is
available in a uniform way.
Best regards,
Simon
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