Side Note: Excel doesn't count as a maths program, though a lot of people are treating it as one. It has its own merit though, as we will discuss below.
Sage is an open source mathematics software which has a grand vision of rivaling the commercial ones.
To recap the advantages of open source software (OSS), first it is free, both as in free beer, and also as in free speech. An added advantage that commercial softwares will not have is the source code for the whole program is available for your reading pleasure. This is a double-sided sword though, especially in situations when your simulation results don't agree with your theoretical results, and the dead line for submitting the conference paper is 3 hours away. At this time, OSS will burn you because as a graduate student, you are not only required to write the paper, you also need to have the ability to fix bugs in your program, in your computer, and those that crawl around in your office. If you have the source code for the software already, what excuse can you give to your professor except to open the window and jump from there?
Now, if you are using M$ products, the story is different: if we were using Excel, swiftly we can push the blame to M$: "Well, Excel just plots the results that way! It was a piece of shit because yesterday I tried to compute 1+1 it said the answer was 10!! " and remember to put on an innocent look. Here is a classic one for your reference. (obviously you won't tell your professor you were computing binary numbers the day before, will you?)
Personally I haven't tried Sage yet, but from the first look its features are impressive. One thing I particularly admire is the use of Python as the script language.
Take it out for a spin, for those lonely people who are
2 comments:
Wonder how it compares with scilab. Have you tried both?
Nope, I haven't had a chance to try out any of these open source software yet.
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