16 ms·

Bill Stein is a genius programmer, and Sage is quite the accomplishment. I wish he was more Chern, less Yau. I go to talks where people credit Sage where I know

Bill Stein is a genius programmer, and Sage is quite the accomplishment. I wish he was more Chern, less Yau. I go to talks where people credit Sage where I know decades of Singular effort were responsible. (I coauthored a similar system; this is a life's work one is dismissing.) Sage was just the envelope, until he could replace the content, in this case unlikely to happen. I wish he was more interested in fixing this sort of user confusion. Draw your own conclusions.

aklemm 9y ago
Users pick full-featured, easy-to-use proprietary software over narrow-use OSS software with awkward UX all day. Stein had a grand vision to make the many OSS math tools actually preferable. I was in the room for a couple early Sage hackathons and the purpose seemed right on.
fjsolwmv 9y ago
Are you obliquely trying to say that Stein is plagiarizing others' work by not giving proper credit to the authors of components of Sage?
williamstein 9y ago
I'm really sorry if some people credit Sage without properly crediting everything Sage depends on. We've gone out of our way to make the architecture of Sage clear. E.g., look at the description of Sage on our website: "SageMath is a free open-source mathematics software system licensed under the GPL. It builds on top of many existing open-source packages: NumPy, SciPy, matplotlib, Sympy, Maxima, GAP, FLINT, R and many more. Access their combined power through a common, Python-based language or directly via interfaces or wrappers." The "and many more" is a link to each component of Sage. I also often tried in talks to always define sage as: (1) a distribution of open source math software, and (2) a Python library that ties them together. Given the mostly volunteer nature of the project, many Sage developers are mostly concerned with creating software to support their research (which they then want to get back to), instead of worrying about the very important social points that you bring up.
zeth___ 9y ago
Sounds like the old "linux isn't linux, it's gnu/linux/x/firefox" debate. If people use sage to get the work done, they are using sage. I don't see intel wanting recognition for every scientific paper ever written on their chips.
- wbl 9y ago
  The problem is that projects like Singular depend on listing papers that have been written with them to get funding and attract contributions. These represent a very significant amount of work. Sage doesn't handle a lot of stuff directly: anything more then basic arithmetic often goes to a specialized package.
  - williamstein 9y ago
    It is not true anymore that "anything more than basic arithmetic goes to a specialized package" (it used to be true back in 2005). The Sage library itself is nearly a million lines of code and is very deep after contributions by over 500 people during 14 years--it's far more than "basic arithmetic".
  - zeth___ 9y ago
    I know scientists are terrible at PR, but why not say: "Used as foundational block of the Sage library, used in the following papers: [...]" then list every paper that used sage. No one can't prove that Singular wasn't called at least once in the writing of that paper. Then sage gets more recognition, singular gets way more recognition and the suits in admin are happy.
xvcase 9y ago
I can't talk about sage, but the Python world in general gives undue credit to some public faces. There are work horses and show horses ...

aklemm 9y ago

Users pick full-featured, easy-to-use proprietary software over narrow-use OSS software with awkward UX all day. Stein had a grand vision to make the many OSS math tools actually preferable. I was in the room for a couple early Sage hackathons and the purpose seemed right on.

fjsolwmv 9y ago

Are you obliquely trying to say that Stein is plagiarizing others' work by not giving proper credit to the authors of components of Sage?

williamstein 9y ago

I'm really sorry if some people credit Sage without properly crediting everything Sage depends on. We've gone out of our way to make the architecture of Sage clear. E.g., look at the description of Sage on our website: "SageMath is a free open-source mathematics software system licensed under the GPL. It builds on top of many existing open-source packages: NumPy, SciPy, matplotlib, Sympy, Maxima, GAP, FLINT, R and many more. Access their combined power through a common, Python-based language or directly via interfaces or wrappers." The "and many more" is a link to each component of Sage. I also often tried in talks to always define sage as: (1) a distribution of open source math software, and (2) a Python library that ties them together. Given the mostly volunteer nature of the project, many Sage developers are mostly concerned with creating software to support their research (which they then want to get back to), instead of worrying about the very important social points that you bring up.

zeth___ 9y ago

Sounds like the old "linux isn't linux, it's gnu/linux/x/firefox" debate. If people use sage to get the work done, they are using sage. I don't see intel wanting recognition for every scientific paper ever written on their chips.

wbl 9y ago
The problem is that projects like Singular depend on listing papers that have been written with them to get funding and attract contributions. These represent a very significant amount of work. Sage doesn't handle a lot of stuff directly: anything more then basic arithmetic often goes to a specialized package.
- williamstein 9y ago
  It is not true anymore that "anything more than basic arithmetic goes to a specialized package" (it used to be true back in 2005). The Sage library itself is nearly a million lines of code and is very deep after contributions by over 500 people during 14 years--it's far more than "basic arithmetic".
- zeth___ 9y ago
  I know scientists are terrible at PR, but why not say: "Used as foundational block of the Sage library, used in the following papers: [...]" then list every paper that used sage. No one can't prove that Singular wasn't called at least once in the writing of that paper. Then sage gets more recognition, singular gets way more recognition and the suits in admin are happy.

xvcase 9y ago

I can't talk about sage, but the Python world in general gives undue credit to some public faces. There are work horses and show horses ...