Another Sage review - from CUNY Math blog

[kcrisman]

I hadn't seen this before. I think it definitely belongs in the "positive views of Sage" category.   I notice that maybe we want to reorganize http://sagemath.org/library.html or find ways to allow it to be updated more frequently.  At the very least, there are so many independent (i.e. non-Sage developer) reviews of Sage online now that it could easily be a category.

http://cunymathblog.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2012/04/09/sage/

Despite the overall positive tone, I have to say my favorite quote is:

"I can not help but editorialize that installing and using SageTeX took me approximately 4 hours of hair tearing frustration — it is comparable in difficulty to capturing the pegasus."

[john_perry_usm]

On Thursday, March 21, 2013 8:15:05 AM UTC-5, kcrisman wrote:

Despite the overall positive tone, I have to say my favorite quote is:

"I can not help but editorialize that installing and using SageTeX took me approximately 4 hours of hair tearing frustration — it is comparable in difficulty to capturing the pegasus."

I'd say that capturing the Pegasus required either a lot more or a lot less than 4 hours, depending on how you read the tale. On the other hand, perhaps he just means to say that Sage is as elegant and useful as Pegasus, in which case I concur wholeheartedly. :-)

Now, editing this HTML-based Google groups editor using a MacBook -- THAT difficulty is comparable to capturing the Pegasus.

john perry

[Volker Braun]

On Thursday, March 21, 2013 9:25:32 PM UTC+1, john_perry_usm wrote:

On the other hand, perhaps he just means to say that Sage is as elegant and useful as Pegasus, in which case I concur wholeheartedly. :-)

As useful as a horse with wings? Like, you also need a roof over your paddock? And falling off your horse is no longer just a risk of broken bones but certain death? ;-)

[William Stein]

On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 1:25 PM, john_perry_usm <john....@usm.edu> wrote:
> On Thursday, March 21, 2013 8:15:05 AM UTC-5, kcrisman wrote:
>>
>> Despite the overall positive tone, I have to say my favorite quote is:
>>
>> "I can not help but editorialize that installing and using SageTeX took me
>> approximately 4 hours of hair tearing frustration — it is comparable in
>> difficulty to capturing the pegasus."
>
>
> I'd say that capturing the Pegasus required either a lot more or a lot less
> than 4 hours, depending on how you read the tale. On the other hand, perhaps
> he just means to say that Sage is as elegant and useful as Pegasus, in which
> case I concur wholeheartedly. :-)

Fateman famously asked [1] over 7 years ago "Is SAGE an elephant with
feathers?" and then concluded that Sage "is essentially doomed". Now
we see the hole in his argument -- Sage is a horse with feathers, not
an elephant!


[1] http://sci.tech-archive.net/Archive/sci.math.symbolic/2005-12/msg00096.html

[Luiz Felipe Martins]

It may be little consolation for end users, but people do not realize
what a tour de force SageTeX is.

It also took me a while to get SageTeX to work on my Mac, but it is
worth every minute of it.

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[kcrisman]

On Friday, March 22, 2013 9:49:40 AM UTC-4, lfmartins wrote:

It may be little consolation for end users, but people do not realize
what a tour de force SageTeX is.

It also took me a while to get SageTeX to work on my Mac, but it is
worth every minute of it.

 

+1

Does anyone with experience with Sweave/knitr (in R) have any comments about whether SageTeX is easier or harder to use than that? 

[Dan Drake]

On Fri, 22 Mar 2013 at 09:57AM -0700, kcrisman wrote:
> Does anyone with experience with Sweave/knitr (in R) have any comments
> about whether SageTeX is easier or harder to use than that?

I used Sweave to write an exam (which also used SageTeX...) and looking
at it again, I see that after you run "R CMD Sweave ..." (which is built
into R the same way that the SageTeX Python module is built into Sage),
you get a LaTeX file that requires Sweave.sty. That .sty file is, on my
computer, in /usr/share/R/share/texmf/tex/latex/ and I just made a
symlink to that from my own texmf directory.

So it seems to be about the same effort to me. (But perhaps I'm not a
good person to make that judgment...) I'll make a note to compare some
of the R things when I fix up the SageTeX installation guide.

Dan

--
--- Dan Drake
----- http://math.pugetsound.edu/~ddrake
-------

[kcrisman]

By the way, the "state of the art" is now the knitr package.

http://yihui.name/knitr/

Note the pgf use, and "allowing any languages", whatever that means.

[Jason Grout]

On 3/22/13 7:58 PM, kcrisman wrote:
> Note the pgf use, and "allowing any languages", whatever that means.

Note that the newest version of matplotlib has a pgf output option, so
we could in theory (once we upgrade) have sagetex output pgf if we wanted...

Jason

[Dan Drake]

I tested it...if you install the matplotlib spkg from #13693 and change
plot.py so you can save to .pgf files -- it works fine. It will need
some work to make it easy to use from SageTeX, but I'm excited about it.