6 ms·

My Path to Magma

33 points by lukastyrychtr 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
kjhughes 5y ago
The Magma name appears to require disambiguation: His Magma programming language (https://github.com/blainehansen/magma https://github.com/blainehansen/magma): The goal of this project is to: create a programming language and surrounding education/tooling ecosystem capable of making formal verification and provably correct software mainstream and normal among working software engineers. Magma computer algebra system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magma_(computer_algebra_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magma_(computer_algebra_system...): Magma is a computer algebra system designed to solve problems in algebra, number theory, geometry and combinatorics. It is named after the algebraic structure magma. It runs on Unix-like operating systems, as well as Windows.
- jdougan 5y ago
  My first thought was the Magma object database https://github.com/magma-database/magma https://github.com/magma-database/magma
- trylfthsk 5y ago
  And here I was hoping someone was deep diving the prog rock rabbit-hole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magma_(band) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magma_(band)
- CJefferson 5y ago
  I was just about to post the same thing. I don't like picking on things like names, but the "old magma" is still very popular in mathematics.
  - joppy 5y ago
    I heard from a friend (have not verified myself) that the paper in which the Magma computer algebra system was introduced is the most-cited paper in the whole of pure mathematics.
    - williamstein 5y ago
      There is a discussion about how to define this and a comment concluding that indeed by one metric the Magma paper is most cited here: https://mathoverflow.net/questions/199978/the-most-cited-paper-in-mathematics https://mathoverflow.net/questions/199978/the-most-cited-pap... John Cannon, who started Magma, pushed very hard for people to cite that paper whenever they used Magma in a paper. We eventually did something similar with SageMath for a bit, but it felt weird having everybody cite a paper with me personally as the main author, when there are nearly 1000 contributors to Sage, so we made up a reference with the author “The Sage Developers”, or something like that. As a result there is probably no MathSciNet entry tracking citations to Sagemath even though many papers cite Sagemath.
mleonhard 5y ago
I like this idea. I hope to use the language someday and translate (upgrade) my Rust code to it.
exdsq 5y ago
Does this offer any advantages to Ada/Spark? Having worked in formal method environments there's a lot to be said of a tool that's been around for a while. Even with formal methods you can still have bugs and there's a risk in using new tools. Without getting those millions of hours of development time it's hard to know a tool really works regardless of the theory behind it.
- deltaonefour 5y ago
  Yeah, he talks as if this hasn't been tried before. See agda or Idris.

33 points by lukastyrychtr 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

The Magma name appears to require disambiguation: His Magma programming language (https://github.com/blainehansen/magma https://github.com/blainehansen/magma): The goal of this project is to: create a programming language and surrounding education/tooling ecosystem capable of making formal verification and provably correct software mainstream and normal among working software engineers. Magma computer algebra system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magma_(computer_algebra_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magma_(computer_algebra_system...): Magma is a computer algebra system designed to solve problems in algebra, number theory, geometry and combinatorics. It is named after the algebraic structure magma. It runs on Unix-like operating systems, as well as Windows.

jdougan 5y ago
My first thought was the Magma object database https://github.com/magma-database/magma https://github.com/magma-database/magma
trylfthsk 5y ago
And here I was hoping someone was deep diving the prog rock rabbit-hole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magma_(band) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magma_(band)
CJefferson 5y ago
I was just about to post the same thing. I don't like picking on things like names, but the "old magma" is still very popular in mathematics.
- joppy 5y ago
  I heard from a friend (have not verified myself) that the paper in which the Magma computer algebra system was introduced is the most-cited paper in the whole of pure mathematics.
  - williamstein 5y ago
    There is a discussion about how to define this and a comment concluding that indeed by one metric the Magma paper is most cited here: https://mathoverflow.net/questions/199978/the-most-cited-paper-in-mathematics https://mathoverflow.net/questions/199978/the-most-cited-pap... John Cannon, who started Magma, pushed very hard for people to cite that paper whenever they used Magma in a paper. We eventually did something similar with SageMath for a bit, but it felt weird having everybody cite a paper with me personally as the main author, when there are nearly 1000 contributors to Sage, so we made up a reference with the author “The Sage Developers”, or something like that. As a result there is probably no MathSciNet entry tracking citations to Sagemath even though many papers cite Sagemath.

mleonhard 5y ago

I like this idea. I hope to use the language someday and translate (upgrade) my Rust code to it.

exdsq 5y ago

Does this offer any advantages to Ada/Spark? Having worked in formal method environments there's a lot to be said of a tool that's been around for a while. Even with formal methods you can still have bugs and there's a risk in using new tools. Without getting those millions of hours of development time it's hard to know a tool really works regardless of the theory behind it.

deltaonefour 5y ago
Yeah, he talks as if this hasn't been tried before. See agda or Idris.