Re: [sage-devel] Re: Another Sage review - from CUNY Math blog

[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

[leif]

William Stein wrote:
> 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!

On wheels?


-leif

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


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[rjf]

I  think it is worth supplying a specific link to the blog ...

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

in case anyone cares to read the context for the quote as well as the comments.

The "reviewer" is very much taken with the graphical plotting and with TeX.

I suspect that everything could have been done with Maxima, though frankly
I usually avoid advanced gnuplot-ish stuff in Maxima.  I know it is there, but
mostly I can use the simplest version of plot.

The vast bulk of Sage appears to be of no interest.  In the context of
elephants-with-feathers, I think we have a review of
a small subset of the feathers.

Some people like feathers, of course.

I wonder if the reviewer was familiar with other free software (e.g. Axiom, Maxima).
A windows installer of Maxima, downloaded from sourceforge, runs with about
3 clicks and requires no virtualbox, compilation, etc. I haven't installed Axiom
recently, but I recall that it too has nice graphics.

Does this review indicate an uptick, and that I should revise my view
that Sage is doomed?  Not really. 

I feel, about this review, that it is damning with faint praise.
Actually with regard to installation, it is just damning.

It is like a review of a new minivan that says ..

Oh we had a great deal of trouble shifting into DRIVE, but once we
got there, it was great.  For example, look at all the cupholders. Let
me show you the ones in the front.  Here's a picture of the ones in
the second row.  And most remarkably, there are cupholders for the
people in the third row!  There are 14 cupholders all together and
I think that is more than any other van, although I really don't
know much about other minivans, but I would guess they don't
have so many cupholders.

RJF