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SageMath – Open-Source Mathematical Software System

sagemath.org

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Re: SageMath – Open-Source Mathematical Software System

#11

Post by lvh »

placebo wrote: post #3

It's great to see lots of amazing projects and that people get to have more choice and can avoid being locked into one solution, but one thing I'd like to see more in a description of any product (open source or not) especially when there's a learning curve involved, is the use cases where it would make more sense to take on the effort involved in the learning curve for this particular product rather than others that…

I'll give it a shot: Sage is what happens when you build a computer algebra system on a giant pile of existing open source libraries and give it a nice, consistent interface and a ton of starving postdocs to write cool integrations and features.

If you're a programmer and you've used Mathematica or Maple and you've ever found yourself wishing that you'd have something like that except in a real programming environment, Sage is it. Sage is Python (with some syntactical extensions).

Re: SageMath – Open-Source Mathematical Software System

#13

Post by sampo »

sdenton4 wrote: post #7
messe wrote: post #2

Sage is something I keep meaning to learn. Every time I've tried it though, it just didn't feel as polished and integrated as Mathematica.

Unfortunately, the Mathematica language is a 'write-only' language; reading and debugging code months after use is... difficult. And that means it's hard to build up libraries which depend on libraries. The Sage community is great, and pushes a lot of code for research problems; things that are technically possible in Mathematica, which someone might work up into a notebook at some point, with a lot of effort, grow i…

It is true that stuff like (to take a random example)

    Total@Map[Function[{L}, Min @@ Table[dist[func[Array[c[#, k]&, n]]][L], {k, m}]], dd]
is normal and common in Mathematica code. Like with Perl, the culture has started from small scripts making heavy use of shorthands provided by the language, and slowly evolved to writing larger codebases.

Some of this can, on an individual level, be fixed by adopting a clearer coding style. But like Perl 5, the language kind of lures you to use the shorthands a lot.

Re: SageMath – Open-Source Mathematical Software System

#14

Post by abdullahkhalids »

messe wrote: post #2

Sage is something I keep meaning to learn. Every time I've tried it though, it just didn't feel as polished and integrated as Mathematica.

I am unfortunately forced to use Mathematica because my scientific collaborators do so. While I have become very proficient at it, I don't like the interface or the language very much. Its a functional language put into an interface suitable for iterative programming. Loading external libraries is very non-intuitive, and just being able to separate a single program over many files that you can simultaneously edit is hard.

I am looking forward to the day I can switch to Sage and return to coding in emacs.

Re: SageMath – Open-Source Mathematical Software System

#16

Post by gh02t »

sampo wrote: post #13
sdenton4 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, the Mathematica language is a 'write-only' language; reading and debugging code months after use is... difficult. And that means it's hard to build up libraries which depend on libraries. The Sage community is great, and pushes a lot of code for research problems; things that are technically possible in Mathematica, which someone might work up into a notebook at some point, with a lot of effort, grow i…

It is true that stuff like (to take a random example) Total@Map[Function[{L}, Min @@ Table[dist[func[Array[c[#, k]&, n]]][L], {k, m}]], dd] is normal and common in Mathematica code. Like with Perl, the culture has started from small scripts making heavy use of shorthands provided by the language, and slowly evolved to writing larger codebases. Some of this can, on an individual level, be fixed by adopting a clearer c…

It's also cultural- line breaks, indentations, and parenthesis help a lot to make Mathematica more readable, but there's a strong tendency to do things in one liners like you show. Even the official docs are like this. I think even then it can have some readability problems, but it would certainly improve things quite a bit if the community would use a better style.

Re: SageMath – Open-Source Mathematical Software System

#17

Post by ur-whale »

messe wrote: post #2

Sage is something I keep meaning to learn. Every time I've tried it though, it just didn't feel as polished and integrated as Mathematica.

Mathematica has lots of drawbacks, chief among which : if you write Mathematica code, you're building on top of an expensive, closed-source bunch of opaque algorithm that are neither guaranteed to be correct (can't see what they do) nor to continue behaving the way they did when you wrote your code (you're at the mercy of Wolfram changing what the code does).

As far as I'm concerned, this essentially precludes doing anything publishable using Mathematica.

Re: SageMath – Open-Source Mathematical Software System

#18

Post by pitiburi »

badminton1 wrote: post #15

The initial issue with Sage was its packaging due to its large number of dependencies. That is largely a non-issue now for the end user. Now there is also SageMathCloud, that makes it even more convenient to adopt.

You are waaaay outdated. "SageMathCloud is Now CoCalc" since May 2017. Go google it. And it's not free _at all_, except for very basic stuff. Your pricing depends on what you need, from hundreds to thousands of dollars. Not a criticism, only a heads up for the guys reading the comments.

Re: SageMath – Open-Source Mathematical Software System

#19

Post by jimhefferon »

pitiburi wrote: post #18
badminton1 wrote: post #15

The initial issue with Sage was its packaging due to its large number of dependencies. That is largely a non-issue now for the end user. Now there is also SageMathCloud, that makes it even more convenient to adopt.

You are waaaay outdated. "SageMathCloud is Now CoCalc" since May 2017. Go google it. And it's not free _at all_, except for very basic stuff. Your pricing depends on what you need, from hundreds to thousands of dollars. Not a criticism, only a heads up for the guys reading the comments.

CoCalc is an open source system. It is convenient to pay for a setup, which is how they hope to get revenue to pay developers.

Re: SageMath – Open-Source Mathematical Software System

#20

Post by shawn »

sdenton4 wrote: post #7
messe wrote: post #2

Sage is something I keep meaning to learn. Every time I've tried it though, it just didn't feel as polished and integrated as Mathematica.

Unfortunately, the Mathematica language is a 'write-only' language; reading and debugging code months after use is... difficult. And that means it's hard to build up libraries which depend on libraries. The Sage community is great, and pushes a lot of code for research problems; things that are technically possible in Mathematica, which someone might work up into a notebook at some point, with a lot of effort, grow i…

This isn’t true. It depends how you write your Mathematica.

If you define modules, it’s nearly the same as as a scripting language.

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