<div class="im">On Sat, Jan 30, 2010 at 7:32 PM, David MacQuigg <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:macquigg@ece.arizona.edu" target="_blank">macquigg@ece.arizona.edu</a>></span> wrote:<br></div><div class="gmail_quote">
<div class="im"><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
I'm not familiar with Sage, but I wonder if adding a few packages to "pure Python" would do the same.</blockquote></div><div><br>Well,
it would have to be WAY more than a 'few' packages! : ) Sage is
immense. It even has the statistical language R built in. It also has
NumPy and MatPlotLib already included. Name some high quality open
source math library, and it's probably already in Sage!<br>
</div><div class="im"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">I think of Sage as just a replacement for MatLab, not something I would use in programming my mail server.<br>
</blockquote></div><div><br>Yeah, Sage would definitely be a more than
adequate replacement for MatLab. The goal of Sage is to be a viable
open source alternative to Mathematica. And I think it's very close to
achieving that goal. I know there are still things at the moment that
Mathematica can do better than Sage, but there's an army of grad
students (and others) all over the world constantly updating it. The
really cool thing about Sage is that you can use it in a variety of
ways. If you install it locally, you can use it in a REPL style, just
like IDLE. You simply have 'Sage:' instead of '>>>' as a
prompt. But you can also run it in Notebook form through your
browser. It's really well thought out. Then, if you don't want to
have to install such an immense package on your individual machine, you
can use it in Notebook form purely online. A Notebook account is free,
and all your work is stored in the cloud. Now that I've become
familiar enough with it, I absolutely love it. For purposes of
integrating Python and mathematics, Sage is pure genius. Would you
program a mail server with it? Probably not, but that's why Python is
general purpose. <br>
<br>Again, one of the things I truly love about Sage is that at its
core, it is pure Python. I was delighted with something one of my FST
students said. I had been using Sage as my blackboard in class, and
then I started showing them pure Python. My student said that he liked
having to think things through in pure Python better than using Sage
directly, because Sage seemed so overwhelming. When I had them
restricted to just the Python shell, he liked having to reason with
just a small set of constructs. I was glad to hear him say that, as it
showed he was really getting the message about what I was saying
'computational thinking' was all about.<br>
<br>- Michel<br></div></div><font color="#888888"><br clear="all"></font><br>-- <br>"Computer science is the new mathematics."<br><br>-- Dr. Christos Papadimitriou<br>