Happy New Year!

[Kirill Smelkov]

Last year was very intresting and fruitful.

We've made SymPy more capable, faster, and easier to use. A lot of new
people came, not to mention that I myself joined only this summer.

Let's hope that in the new year, we'll see new intresting ideas and
development, new people, both users and developers, new nice discussions
and corversations that will teach us and will stay in our memory as
good.

And of course I hope we'll have more time to spend on SymPy -- we have
so many things to improve!

So, I wish to all SymPy'ers all the good, love, health to you, and your
families, ... and also for your cup to always be full of your favorite
drink :)

P.S. My girlfriend Varya asked me to say hello to SymPy :)

**** HAPPY NEW YEAR 2008 ****

[Ondrej Certik]

Hi Kirill and others!

Thanks for the writeup. :) I also did a writeup today about the
current state of SymPy, sympycore and Sage.calculus, available at:

http://planet.sympy.org/

or the direct link:

http://ondrejcertik.blogspot.com/2008/01/sympysympycore-pure-python-up-to-5x.html

Looking back at the year 2007, it was a very fruitful year for sympy
indeed. In January, I was the only developer and there were 2 people
on the mailinglist (me and Niels, hi Niels:), now there are already
15 people who wrote at least a patch, but mostly much more than a
patch, and 70 people on the list.
That's a good start.

In the next year, we should try:

* merge improvements from sympycore (one way or the other), thus
speeding sympy up
* simplify internals a little bit (not affecting speed or functionality)
* better integration with Sage, to provide a viable alternative to the
maxima wrappers (see my article above)
* improve the plotting support - cooperate with matplotlib guys on
this - having pure python plotting library with full features could be
the aim, for more info see
(http://code.google.com/p/sympy/issues/detail?id=507)
* numpy/scipy integration (same syntax, make sympy work inside numpy
arrays, etc)
* get more people involved - this will come by itself, if sympy is
good and useful
* have another round of successful google summer of code projects. :)
* maybe, in the other half of the year, we may try rewriting some
parts to C, but this needs to be only optional to the pure python
implementation

And anything, that is useful! numpy, scipy and sympy should cover
everything (or at least most of the things) one may need when doing
scientific computing in Python. Sage is a bigger thing with higher aims.

What shouldn't change:

* pure python, not depending on anything else by default - yes, I
believe we can achieve competitive speeds in pure python only
* download and run - it needs to run out of the box, on linux, windows
and macosx
* regular python library

Ondrej

P.S. Kirill - say hello to your girlfriend Varya. :)