Re: [Axiom-developer] Re: [sage-devel] Re: [fricas-devel] Re: Project

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

William Stein wrote:
> I'm unconvinced that literate programming is a silver bullet that
> solves the problem of making code easier to understand later.   I do
> strongly
> advocate documenting and writing excellent test suites for code.
> All code that goes into Sage has every function tested, documented,
> and it is refereed by a different person (who may as well be somebody
> reading the code 15 years later...).  I think peer review is a valuable
> step in the right direction toward solving the problem you are addressing.
> That's what's done in mathematics to increase the chances that
> somebody can understand a math paper 15 years after it is written.

Well, literate programming may not be a silver bullet, but its "dual", 
reproducible research, is a concept I as a practitioner find *very* 
attractive. The base entity in reproducible research, as espoused by a 
number of people in the R community, is something called a "compendium". 
A compendium is a software package that contains all the code and data 
necessary to reproduce the research. No more generating pictures with R, 
exporting them to PDFs or Postscript, pasting them into a LaTeX 
document, only to discover that you have a bug, and having to go through 
the whole edit-test-cut-paste cycle all over again.

A lot of this magic right now is really only easy with R and the LaTeX 
editor LyX. But I can sit at my workstation and edit a paper in LyX, put 
the code in it to generate figures, put more code in it that's visible 
if I want to document an algorithm. At any time, I can push a button and 
get a PDF of the document, at the same time executing any other code 
that doesn't appear in the document. And with "RUnit", I can easily add 
unit tests.

Essentially all you need to do this (on Linux -- it doesn't work on 
Windows yet and I'm not sure about Macs or Solaris) is to install R and 
LyX and their dependencies. There's a contributed package that adds a 
bit of "glue logic" to the LyX configuration, but once you do that, the 
workflow is quite author-friendly.

> I guess that's true.  At some point in the future nobody in particular
> will be available.

Except Woody Allen ... as you probably know, he said, "I don't plan to 
achieve immortality through my works. I plan to achieve immortality by 
not dying." :)

> >  Lisp has already solved a lot of the problems Python has yet to
> >  face. But since that discussion is a prelude to a language war
> >  I'll end it here.
>
> That's where you're a *lot* more fun to discuss mathematical
> software with that Richard Fateman!  Thanks for taking the
> time to write.

Well, there really are only two "perfect" languages, Lisp/Scheme and 
Forth. ;)

> > They are going to die because all
> >  companies die and they are going to disappear because dying
> >  companies take their code with them (witness Symbolics and
> >  Macsyma).

Well, Maxima isn't all that far removed from Macsyma and Vaxima.

> All that matters to me regarding the above comments are
> the *next* 30 years, since after that I'll likely be "done".
> And it's possible that none of Maple/Mathematica/Matlab
> will die in the next 30 years.

I'd be willing to bet Mathematica survives. I won't comment on the other 
two. Lisp will survive too, no matter how hard Paul Graham tries to 
"improve" it. :)

> Not for me.  I just want to "finish" Sage as soon as possible,
> so I can do research and teaching using it.   From this point
> of view, Sage is surprisingly close to where I want.
> It's I think at most 1 or 2 years away.  One important thing that we aren't
> yet close on is very good native Microsoft Windows support;
> and I don't mean crippled Cygwin support or virtual machines.

You aren't the only open source project that has poor Windows support. 
But there are some happy exceptions. I personally prefer the Windows UI 
for R to the "native" Linux one.