4 ms·

Jupyter isn't a foil for mathematica. It has completely different use cases. The straight one to one fight is between sagemath, or their rebranded cocal site,

Jupyter isn't a foil for mathematica. It has completely different use cases. The straight one to one fight is between sagemath, or their rebranded cocal site, and mathematica. In terms of ability to do things sagemath is the glue between all the amazing open source math and science software that has been written over the last 50 years. https://cocalc.com/ https://cocalc.com/ But in terms of presentation by far the best is org-mode with sage, julia and everything else tied in. One text file that can be emailed around, put under version control, and can speak two dozen computer languages with babel, and has latex support for both pdf and html output.

williamstein 9y ago
Thanks for mentioning SageMath and CoCalc (I founded both of these projects)! A minor clarification is that CoCalc is not a rebranding of SageMath, but is instead a new web application whose goal is to make it very easy to collaboratively use Sage, Jupyter, LaTeX, Julia, etc. In constract, Sage is a more traditional open source software package, which people install on their own computers. The goal of Sage is to be a viable open source alternative to the core Mathematica computer algebra system (and also to Magma, etc.), whereas the goal of CoCalc is to make all technical open source software very, very easily accessible, mainly to students.
- zeth___ 9y ago
  Have you had a look at org-mode babel? It's extremely interesting how they have managed to create an all plain text environment that is in some ways[0] better than the current notebooks. Of course it's not as user friendly and needs quite a bit of polish, and a major refactor to separate the above use case from the tangle use case. The tangle part of org is even more interesting as it's probably the first fully literate system that allows you to completely document everything about a software project. And since it's language agnostic I do mean everything from install, compile, connect to the external databases, export the documentation in every format under the sun and whatever else you can think of (including docx through pandoc). I'm going through the source code slowly to get it streamlined, but the code is suffering from the typical lisp syndrome of "Everything is implemented everywhere." [0] Being able to run multiple languages on the same org file, controlling environments for scripting languages, compiling on page for non-scripting languages.
  - williamstein 9y ago
    Yes, org-mode is very inspiring. But, as you say, it's not quite user friendly enough for some target audiences (e.g., beginning students).
- ChrisRackauckas 9y ago
  First of all, thank you for all of your hard work. One thing I am curious about though is how you think you can match the "cohesiveness" of Mathematica. While I am not a big fan of Mathematica the language, there is something gained by a top down approach. The options all seem to have the same names, the display tools tend to compose with new functionality well, the symbolic parts integrate well with the numerical tooling. While the poly-sourcing approach of Sage can definitely excel in the features area (and definitely surpass it in more "esoteric" areas of algebra), I do think that the tools end up with a higher barrier to entry since it's much harder to police syntactic and dependency inconsistencies. I am trying to work out some of these problems of my own and was wondering how you're coping with it.
  - williamstein 9y ago
    > how you think you can match the "cohesiveness" of Mathematica The basic strategy is to provide a new Python library ("the sage library" [1]), which is a layer between the user and the other dependencies. E.g., instead of just saying "use Maxima for symbolic limits", we have our own notion of symbolic functions (implemented using Ginac), and automatically convert them to and from Maxima when doing symbolic limits. The user never has to know anything about Maxima. When we first implemented this, it just used interprocess communication under the hood, but (thanks to Nils Bruin and others) we now use a direct C library interface builton top of ECL (embedded common lisp). This "new Python library", which isn't so new, since I started it in 2004, is now nearly a million lines of code. [1] https://github.com/sagemath/sage/tree/master/src/sage https://github.com/sagemath/sage/tree/master/src/sage

williamstein 9y ago

Thanks for mentioning SageMath and CoCalc (I founded both of these projects)! A minor clarification is that CoCalc is not a rebranding of SageMath, but is instead a new web application whose goal is to make it very easy to collaboratively use Sage, Jupyter, LaTeX, Julia, etc. In constract, Sage is a more traditional open source software package, which people install on their own computers. The goal of Sage is to be a viable open source alternative to the core Mathematica computer algebra system (and also to Magma, etc.), whereas the goal of CoCalc is to make all technical open source software very, very easily accessible, mainly to students.

zeth___ 9y ago
Have you had a look at org-mode babel? It's extremely interesting how they have managed to create an all plain text environment that is in some ways[0] better than the current notebooks. Of course it's not as user friendly and needs quite a bit of polish, and a major refactor to separate the above use case from the tangle use case. The tangle part of org is even more interesting as it's probably the first fully literate system that allows you to completely document everything about a software project. And since it's language agnostic I do mean everything from install, compile, connect to the external databases, export the documentation in every format under the sun and whatever else you can think of (including docx through pandoc). I'm going through the source code slowly to get it streamlined, but the code is suffering from the typical lisp syndrome of "Everything is implemented everywhere." [0] Being able to run multiple languages on the same org file, controlling environments for scripting languages, compiling on page for non-scripting languages.
- williamstein 9y ago
  Yes, org-mode is very inspiring. But, as you say, it's not quite user friendly enough for some target audiences (e.g., beginning students).
ChrisRackauckas 9y ago
First of all, thank you for all of your hard work. One thing I am curious about though is how you think you can match the "cohesiveness" of Mathematica. While I am not a big fan of Mathematica the language, there is something gained by a top down approach. The options all seem to have the same names, the display tools tend to compose with new functionality well, the symbolic parts integrate well with the numerical tooling. While the poly-sourcing approach of Sage can definitely excel in the features area (and definitely surpass it in more "esoteric" areas of algebra), I do think that the tools end up with a higher barrier to entry since it's much harder to police syntactic and dependency inconsistencies. I am trying to work out some of these problems of my own and was wondering how you're coping with it.
- williamstein 9y ago
  > how you think you can match the "cohesiveness" of Mathematica The basic strategy is to provide a new Python library ("the sage library" [1]), which is a layer between the user and the other dependencies. E.g., instead of just saying "use Maxima for symbolic limits", we have our own notion of symbolic functions (implemented using Ginac), and automatically convert them to and from Maxima when doing symbolic limits. The user never has to know anything about Maxima. When we first implemented this, it just used interprocess communication under the hood, but (thanks to Nils Bruin and others) we now use a direct C library interface builton top of ECL (embedded common lisp). This "new Python library", which isn't so new, since I started it in 2004, is now nearly a million lines of code. [1] https://github.com/sagemath/sage/tree/master/src/sage https://github.com/sagemath/sage/tree/master/src/sage