William Stein wrote: > On Sat, Nov 21, 2009 at 1:10 AM, Simon King <[email protected]> wrote: >> Hi! >> >> If I am not mistaken, Mathematica calls it "manipulate", while >> "interact" is Sage's brand. Sorry if I got this wrong. > > Correct. Mathematica has a command "Manipulate" that is similar to > Sage's @interact decorator. I made up the name "interact" because > it more clearly expresses the intent, and sounds less sinister than > "manipulate". > >> Admittedly my memory for those things is not good, but I think I >> remember that Sage had that feature before Mathematica. In that case, >> let us hope that Sage does not end like the inventors of the >> telephone, Philipp Reis (first public demonstration of a phone link in >> 1861) and Antonio Meucci (first presentation of a device in 1860 >> [without a phone link] and first patent application in 1871 [but >> running out of money, so, his caveat expired])... > > I would say that Enthought was a real pioneer in this feature with > their "Traits" system long, long before either Mathematica or Sage had > this capability. So maybe the chronology is: >
I would put things like the GLUI library here (1999; see http://glui.sourceforge.net/). Certainly, the idea of controls linked up to "live" variables happened before 1999 as well. > 2002 (??): Enthought traites, which makes it really easy to make > interactive gui's to manipulate data/python code -- this is a core > (but open source) technology that Enthought developed as part of their > business model. > > 2006 (?): Mathematica's Manipulate is introduced, I think in > Mathematica 6. It's declared by Wolfram to be the most important > innovation since the wheel. > > 2007: We had a joint Sage days at Enthought, in which there were > several excellent talks by Enthought'ers about how Traits works and > what it is. Seeing this, I coded with little sleep for a week, and > wrote Sage's @interact. This has been subsequently polished by Igor > Tolkov, Jason Grout, and many other people. > > I want to emphasize that Sage's @interact owes something to > Mathematica's Manipulate, but a lot more to Enthought's Traits. I had > tried to do something like Mathematica's manipulate before that Sage > days, but just couldn't figure out how to do it; however, when I > learned all about Traits suddenly the solution was clear. > -- Jason Grout -- 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 URL: http://www.sagemath.org
