The Reformation of Sage (ICMS 2024 plenary lecture)

[Matthias Köppe]

Next week I will speak about the Sage modularization project at the
International Congress on Mathematical Software 2024. I am pleased to
share the paper accompanying my lecture, which is now available as
part of the conference proceedings:
https://maths.dur.ac.uk/icms2024/ICMS2024.html (limited time free
access through the referrer link).

--
Matthias Koeppe -- http://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~mkoeppe

[Kwankyu Lee]

Congratulations!

Thanks for sharing the proceedings article, which gives insights on what we have done and where we are going.

[Kwankyu Lee]

About "where we are going", we are aware of some obstacles on the way. The most "worries" are on packages that are named after a basic mathematical structure  as described in https://groups.google.com/g/sage-devel/c/kiB32zP3xD4. We see them expressed in https://github.com/sagemath/sage/pull/36964.

W1. What is the criterion of including a module in a package? 

Let us take (P) sagemath-graphs as an example. From the description of (P): (D) it's a package that defines graphs and recognizable generalizations thereof and contains code that directly makes use of such structures.

Q1 Martin questions why sage.combinat.abstract_tree is in (P): https://github.com/sagemath/sage/pull/36964#discussion_r1564162445

Q2 Kwankyu questions why sage.knots is in (P): https://github.com/sagemath/sage/pull/38118#issuecomment-2141321507. 

(D) does not seem to clearly answer these questions. (D) may be an abstract way of expressing a technical criterion behind. If so, what is the technical criterion?

W2. Does dissecting the sage library into pieces of packages prevent code in a module in a package from using code in a module in other packages? For example,  Since sagemath-graphs is below sagemath-standard-no-symbolics, code in (P) cannot use symbolics? 

Q3 Martin fears that at some point there is a request not to use symbolics in some module, because Lisp is hard to install on some system: https://github.com/sagemath/sage/pull/36964#discussion_r1564914013

Take these as questions from the audience in the plenary lecture hall :-)