The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a company [pdf]

Re:The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a... by maweki on Saturday June 11, 2016 @01:24PM (#11884306)

The problem with Sage, while it's an amazing piece of software, that it is abysmally documented. As is maxima. Sure, there's an example on how to do integration and anything on a high-school level but every time I wanted to do something a little bit more complex, I was completely lost. I found the Mathematica documentation to be miles ahead.

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Re:The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a... by williamstein on Saturday June 11, 2016 @01:46PM (#11884408)

You are of course completely right. Almost everybody who works on Sage does so as part of some research mathematics project, often in their spare time, and they just don't have time do the massive amount of work to bring the documentation to the same level of user friendliness as Mathematica. I hope SageMath, Inc. will be able to makes strides to improve documentation for open source math software. Also, this by Greg Bard is a bright spot: http://www.gregorybard.com/Sage.html

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Re:The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a... by zhte415 on Saturday June 11, 2016 @09:11PM (#11886172)

A quick fix for this would be recording screen while working on something. And promote work you're doing in the process.

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Re:The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a... by acidflask on Saturday June 11, 2016 @01:26PM (#11884323)

And the problem with academic funding is that it's really hard to pay people to improve the documentation with those funds.

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