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The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a company [pdf]

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Re: The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a company [pdf]

#181

Post by programnature »

ddumas wrote: post #58

I'm glad William included slide 10 calling attention to the hostile and insulting attitude Wolfram Research has toward mathematicians and reproducible science in general. (I think some of Sage Math Inc's other closed-course competitors likely have similar attitudes, but Wolfram Research seems to be the worst.) "You should realize at the outset that while knowing about the internals of Mathematica may be of intellectu…

Did you also appreciate slide 28? "I used to think Wolfram was wrong. Now I am not so sure."

Re: The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a company [pdf]

#182

Post by tabbott »

infinity0 wrote: post #155
williamstein wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2007, Tim Abbott (before founding ksplice and zulip) beautifully and properly packaged Sage for Debian, and in fact Sage was included in Debian standard! Unfortunately, he stopped working on the project (when he started those projects), and of course we had no money to hire somebody else to maintain what he did. If I had money, it would be a total no brainer to spend it on supporting packaging SageMath for Debian.…

OK, more accurately I should have said "much much more cost than is necessary", instead of "impossible". The point is that, it should not cost significant continual effort to package SageMath for Debian: if SageMath was following good engineering practises, then Tim Abbott's work would still function today, even taking into account necessarily but normal and minimal maintenance costs that Debian volunteers (including…

Tim Abbott here :)

The challenge of packaging Sage was primarily around packaging its dozens of dependencies (some of which I had to talk to the authors to fix their licensing terms) and making sure that an up-to-date version of those dependencies was available in Debian. It took about a month of my time to package Sage well for Debian (at the time I maintained over 100 Debian packages for MIT, so I was quite efficient at this).

What killed my Debian packaging effort was that Sage was very large and my package was submitted to the NEW queue (where Debian does copyright review) when all the reviewers were busy with managing a release freeze. So it took more than 6 months for Debian's FTP masters to fully review it, and by the time they did, I had moved from being a grad student to the CTO of Ksplice. It probably would have been just week or two's work for me to update Sage across those 6 months, but running a startup is a lot of work, and I never found the time to do that work :(.

Overall, my opinion is that Sage is well-engineered and not difficult to package given its scale (it has a fantastic test suite, so it was very easy to check if the package worked, and it was easy to get them to merge changes to improve the tooling). The problem is that it's a large project, with a large number of diverse dependencies, new versions of which aren't always backwards-compatible upgrades. If you talk to the folks who package other large projects for Debian, I'd be surprised if you find any that don't involve significant maintenance work.

Re: The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a company [pdf]

#183

Post by williamstein »

daly wrote: post #179

(disclosure: I'm the Axiom Lead Developer) I really applaud William's effort to build a company. I wish him all the best and will be willing to provide what help I can. I wrote an AMS diatribe http://www.ams.org/notices/201202/rtx120200320p.pdf about publishing computational mathematics, making several points, one of which was that "Algorithm implementations are proprietary. This needs to end. Science is not done beh…

Thanks for posting. (1) I strongly agree that the problems of rigorous computational mathematics are far, far deeper than anything I even begin to hint at in my talk. It's daunting. (2) I think http://www.numfocus.org/ -- a new org I think Travis Oliphant co-founded -- may be an attempt to solve some of the accounting organization issues. What do you think of what they are doing? Maybe the best thing is to work with them.

Re: The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a company [pdf]

#184

Post by williamstein »

infinity0 wrote: post #176
iguananaut wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the goal is to have it actually in Debian. One argument that's been made against this is that Debian moves to slowly, and an old (but supported!) version of Sage is not useful to its current core user base of research mathematicians who often need the bleeding edge and/or are developing new code directly in Sage. My counter argument is that we want to expand Sage's user base beyond a small core of researchers, an…

Perhaps we should continue this by email - you can contact me at infinity0@debian.org > Debian moves to slowly [..] My counter argument is that we want to expand Sage's user base [..] Beyond that - "too slowly" applies only for "Debian stable"; and users that are OK with less stability can use "Debian testing". Usually this is quite bug-free; things only enter testing if it's been in "Debian unstable" bug-free for 5-…

I also definitely want Sage in Debian, and don't think the "Debian moves too slowly" argument is valid anymore for Sage. It was a compelling argument in 2007, as mentioned elsewhere, but Sage is much more mature now. infinity0 -- thanks for your encouragement from Debian!!

Re: The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a company [pdf]

#185

Post by gohrt »

carlob wrote: post #90
bitwize wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why when Big Bang Theory debuted, I thought Sheldon Cooper was specifically supposed to be a parody of Stephen Wolfram. In math, how you came by the results you came by is always relevant. Don't tell mathematicians they don't need to know that. It's their job to know that.

Well, no. They are not at all alike. Stephen Wolfram has a lot more _people skills_ than Sheldon Cooper. Sheldon Cooper is the stereotype of the Asperger scientist who succeeds despite his inability to interact with people, while Stephen Wolfram has been at the helm of a tech company for 30+ years, and that's not something you can really do without having to interact with other people.

Wolfram invented v1 of Mathematica, and founded a company to sell it to technical users. It takes minimal people skills to hire people and to sell a technically good product.

Re: The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a company [pdf]

#186

Post by gohrt »

carlob wrote: post #98
x0x0 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An acquaintance who worked directly for him would disagree with you.

I still do and I beg to differ. I'm not saying he's the most personable human being I've met but he's certainly not autistic like Sheldon.

While you are here, would you care to offer any other diagnoses of people you've never met or who don't actually exist?

Re: The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a company [pdf]

#187

Post by gohrt »

dash2 wrote: post #149
MichaelBurge wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're assuming that the ROI generated by football isn't a transfer from other universities who lose students to the spending uni. More likely, funding football is a zero sum game which generates no overall benefit for the research community.

You think that football game attendees (and T-shirt buyers, and...) would write checks to math researchers if football got cancelled?

Re: The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a company [pdf]

#188

Post by gohrt »

tmptmp wrote: post #127
niels_olson wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the ROI on the football program is obvious and huge compared to literally any department at the university.

Since when it has become acceptable that the goal of academic institute is/should be dirty ROI? And then why just football? Start funding cabaret, rave parties and poll-dance events as they surely will have more ROI. Sports has been the undoing of US education in schools [1] earlier and now it seems even in higher ed. The sooner they get rid of sports from educational institutes the better for them. [1] http://www.th…

High school is not the same as college.

Also, The Atlantic is not a reliable source. It prints garbage like this:

"Football at Premont cost about $1,300 a player. Math, by contrast, cost just $618 a student."

even though everyone at the school takes math, very few play football, and not everyone involved in football is a player.

Re: The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a company [pdf]

#189

Post by paulmasson »

noobermin wrote: post #85

I hate to be that guy, but this needs to be said. The guy on page 15 was right. Sage should have at least put a little more effort into their applications, because if it did, it would be much more popular and thus more developed. Back in 2011 or so, as a young undergrad, I latched onto sage and used it for an undergrad research project. My BS was from a tiny university (one year, I was the only Physics major in the s…

As a developer who has recently begun contributing to SageMath, I have to concur with this comment. It's taken me some time to realize the extent to which Sage is geared toward pure mathematicians. The recent changes, for example, in Sage's piecewise() function have made it much less friendly in numerical evaluation than Mathematica's Piecewise[]. If Sage is to have a wider audience, transitions between symbolics and numerics need to become much more expedient.

Perhaps I can help in making that happen. And so might other people reading this thread!

Re: The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a company [pdf]

#190

Post by x0x0 »

iheartmemcache wrote: post #148
selimthegrim wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't he write a book or two on Java parallelism?

Yeah, it was the 'go to' seminal text for a while. I've used his malloc implementation in a few projects. He's also an ACM fellow, so, not really unsung (not denigrating his work, just saying that his work is fairly well known in both academia and the industry).

Sorry, I meant unsung in the sense that his work doesn't produce lots of the usual markers of academic success, iepapers. Also, Oswego is not really what you'd call an academic powerhouse. Measured by impact, I'd think there's be a software engineering group at cmu, mit, berkeley, stanford, michigan, madison, etc that would love to have him work there.
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