Slashdot Mirror
Open Source 'Sage' Takes Aim at High End Math Software
coondoggie writes "A new open source mathematics program is looking to push aside commercial software commonly used in mathematics education, in large government laboratories and in math-intensive research. The program's backers say the software, called Sage, can do anything from mapping a 12-dimensional object to calculating rainfall patterns under global warming."
But I use Mathematica because it is full of functionality, fairly reliable, and has a very elegant programming paradigm. Also, as a student, it'll cost me $100-150, depending on where I live, for the lifetime of my studentship, assuming no site license; the kinds of business that run this software commercially really don't care too much about a $2500 license fee.
Free software isn't about price -- it is about freedom. One of the research groups at my university cannot use Mathematica since a few weeks because the license expired, and neither renewing the license nor contacting tech support has so far brought a solution.
Another no-go is that Mathematica 6 notebooks are not compatible with Mathematica 5 notebooks. Also, the unwillingness of Wolfram to timely fix bugs leading to wrong results is unacceptable. I could go on ranting like this, but recently I have completely switched to Maxima and have not regretted it.
OS Reviews: Free and Open Source Software
I work in Europe, as a researcher, and two and three years ago, the Mathworks (the company behind Matlab) decided we weren't eligible to research/education prices anymore. They did the same with a bunch of other institutes (in Europe, I don't know about the US). We operate an experimental reactor, whose control is largely based on Matlab programs. Some of these were developed a long time and people left, or retired. There's a lot to be said about the way this was handled by our management, but that's the way it is. So, we had to admit we were screwed, having to pay the price. We met with the Mathworks representatives, and I have to say all I saw a bunch of arrogant jerks.
Anyway, since then, we've renewed our licences every year, and we've been looking for an alternative. We even tried to migrate the whole lab to Scilab but that didn't work out (mostly because of the limited capabilities of Scilab in scientific plotting and GUIs). Some of us use Python + Matplotlib (I'm a big fan), some (often the same people) use Octave. Although we've converted some individuals, we weren't able to find a software which could be used by everyone in the lab as a substitute to Matlab. This is frustrating, as the vast majority of people here use only a fraction of the capabilities of Matlab.
I for one, would be really happy if we had something to replace Matlab, be it Sage or whatever else...
When I meant not good at linear algebra, I meant that it is slow. For example, Sage is over 30x faster at computing the characteristic polynomial of a matrix over the integers. Regarding number theory, there isn't really any support in Mathematica for working with number fields, modular forms, or elliptic curves. What I meant by "real" programming language was that there is a lot of software out there that can be taken advantage of. Say for instance I need to work with data stored in an relational database. How easy is that to do with Mathematica? It is trivial with Sage since Sage uses Python. When Sage needs to do things fast, it uses Cython ( http://www.cython.org/ ) which is almost a superset of Python and compiles down to C.
--Mike