141–150 of 202 posts
Slightly off-topic: Does anyone know if Sage allows for lisp-style meta-programming like Mathematica?
sage: lisp('(+ 2 3)')
5
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I just tried to get a binary to install it on Windows. Instead they are handing out only OVM files (VirtualBox images.) As much as they might despise closed-source, there are simple things that businesses necessitate - like not being hostile to your audience. I am a fucking programmer, I don't have a problem using VirtualBox. At the same time, it infuriates me that they did not bundle up an MSI or EXE for their windo…
I'm sorry. The point of my talk is that Sage is not a viable alternative to Mathematica, etc., for many reasons, e.g., not having a native Windows version. Porting a huge amount of deep technical software from Linux to Windows is the sort of difficult and thankless work that will not get somebody tenure in academia. I tried hard to get funding to get help on a Windows port, and Microsoft donated $30K for this effort…
Glad to see you take the leap! (I launched preemptible VMs at Google and have admired your work from afar)
This story reminds me of Prof. Tim Davis of Texas A&M, formerly Florida, who I heard had a hard time getting tenure, after making the software and mathematical world a much better place. He (and his group) developed CHOLMOD and UMFPACK and other sparse solvers used everywhere. Basically, when you type A/b in Matlab, it calls his code. It was an incredibly challenging task going from sort-of/kind-of being able to solv…
x = A\b gives the solution to Ax=b, and x=b/A gives the solution to xA=b. But when would you type A/b ?
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Those lone software new code are bound to sage, not separable Python modules?
Yes, they are bound to sage. I really, really want to break things apart into separate Python modules that can be used outside Sage. However, that's an enormous amount of work that doesn't help at all with finishing a math research paper, so it's unlikely to happen without money. I've proposed and brought up exactly this very frequently on the Sage mailing lists in the last year. If the company makes money, one my dr…
Will you need to release these modules under the GPL?
Does make sense - academia is about theory, businesses are part of implementing end user solutions. most of academia runs on a tech stack delivered by commercial entities anyway. Building products is not as much about creativity as delivering a fixed product with a service plan and support chain in addition to product development. Companies have various operations to create full fledged products - academia can supply…
What you are describing is the status quo, but it is certainly possible for government to fund software development. As William points out in his presentation, it is already being done indirectly through software license purchases. I think it would be interesting to see what academics could achieve if they were offered some modest grants aimed at developing and maintaining viable open-source alternatives to all comme…
I think this would be a waste of academics. Commercial software is not expensive (mostly) because of some secret sauce. It's because delivering a functioning product requires lots of work that is thoroughly mundane and repeatable.
Analogously, one could employ chemists to bottle coca cola or metallurgists to package hammers but that would be just a waste of everyones assets.
Should government make it's own pencils? I don't think so.
Good products require lots of work that is hard to be intrinsically motivated of.
This is why I love sagemath, and open source in general. I cloned the repo a few weeks ago after hearing him mention how he is mainly the sole developer. It's a huge undertaking and i know how draining something like that can be for motivation. I may not have time to do a lot but i am gonna join in and help as much as possible. Documentation, bug fixes, whatever. This project deserves it imo
Minor clarification -- I'm definitely not "mainly the sole developer" of Sage. There are over a hundred people that have contributed to Sage during the last year, and our release manager (not me) works very hard putting together these releases. I did most of the work on SageMathCloud though...
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I heard (and hope it's true!) Prof Davis got a well-deserved license fee from MathWorks... Prof Doug Lea at Oswego is another unsung hero who has done a ton for programming and particularly parallel programming. A big chunk of java's std library is copyright Josh Bloch and Doug Lea. In particular, Prof Lea built jsr166.
Didn't he write a book or two on Java parallelism?
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Except the ROI on the football program is obvious and huge compared to literally any department at the university.
By definition of positive ROI, the university has more money than before, which in particular means it can spend more money on research by building football stadia. On the wider scale, extracurriculars only affect[2] share-of-students rather than increase the total number of students[1], so such programs have a globally negative ROI. But each individual university is making a rational decision. [1] I'm assuming there…
How does the trajectory of SageMath compare to Julia?
This question keeps me up at night, as I presume it does for my colleagues at Julia Computing. Not that switching to a fully commercial model is necessarily a bad thing, but Julia Labs, like any academic group, always has to worry about where funding will come from.