Am 02.11.2014 um 05:30 schrieb Richard Fateman:
On Saturday, November 1, 2014 2:00:17 PM UTC-7, Aaron Meurer wrote:
On Thu, Oct 30, 2014 at 5:49 PM, Richard Fateman <[email protected]
<javascript:>> wrote:
On Tuesday, October 28, 2014 9:30:19 AM UTC-7, Aaron Meurer wrote:
Being open source is definitely a plus for SymPy here. The authors
could have stepped through SymPy with a debugger to help figure out
their problem, and submitted a pull request for a fix once they found
it.
If they knew anything about debugging and SymPy, which is not so
probable.
Sure it is. This is an advantage of having a CAS use the same language
that it is written in. The more capable you are at SymPy the more
capable you are at understanding how it works internally.
I don't see why this follows.
It doesn't magically give the users the ability to debug sources, but it
sure removes all the syntactical and many semantic barriers that keep
end users out of debugging the code.
Mathematica makes it easy to debug those parts that are implemented
using Mathematica's language itself, so it leverages that effect as well
(or it could if WR published those workbooks, don't know if they do).
It sounded
to me like the authors were capable Mathematica users.
Just barely, I think.
Is this even inferrable from a single four-page paper?
They were capable enough to isolate the problem, and to write a
generator for affected matrices and have Mathematica automatically test
for validity. That's some pretty solid if basic engineering. Not
necessarily Mathematica skill, of course.
Historically, this argument has been made over and over again, and
yet you see that Mathematica gets more stuff written in C each version.
I guess that's for performance reasons.
Ironically, there's a CSymPy effort for much the same reason.
However, the SymPy code is far less obscure than Mathematica where the
language itself shows signs of... erm... "organic growth".
It's a spectrum. You can't make a CAS 100% accessible to nonprogrammers,
but you can make it, say, 60% accessible, and using the same language
for end users and implementation contributes a lot. Particularly if it's
a relatively easy-to-learn one like Python (Java would not work half as
well for that purpose, and C not at all).
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"sympy" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to [email protected].
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sympy.
To view this discussion on the web visit
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sympy/5455F8EA.6080003%40durchholz.org.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
