SAGE, the CAS
SAGE is a new breed of software: a meta-CAS.
I’m not sure I agree with the idea– marrying together various CASes like Gap, Pari, and Maxima under one umbrella interface seems awkward and unnatural. It brings to mind early attempts to provide cross platform GUIs based on native windowing systems; most such efforts failed precisely because they tried to gloss over the important fact that different windowing systems are different in design, intent, and execution. For the same reasons that GTK is successful and Swing replaced AWT– namely, consistency–, it seems that a CAS should be designed from the ground up, not as a pastiche of codes.
At the same time, I can’t argue with the fruits of this approach: precisely because each component code was written with different target audiences, there is a definite gestalt effect. What one part of SAGE can’t do, maybe another part can. And on the practical side, probably no one is willing to invest time designing a CAS from first principles when there are mature, tested codes around that can be grandfathered in.
SAGE also has an impressive notebook interface– one that the Axiom developers could learn from.
Possibly relevant posts:
- Magic Bullet in Action (10/10/2008)
- Graphical Programming (2/6/2003)
- My first mug shot (1/28/2006)