Re: A free copy of Maple or a frre maple webservre

2 wrote:
"Dave" <foo@xxxxxxx> wrote

Vladimir Bondarenko has shown numerous bugs in Maple which don't get fixed.

Vladimir Bondarenko is a skilled mathematician who has a keen understanding of the internals of Maple. It is not so much that he 'discovered' the bugs but that he _generated_ the bugs.

I'm not sure how you can justify that statement. I don't believe he has generated the bugs, but I do believe some cases at least are probably of little practical significance.

But you need to take what I say in the context I said it - mainly I was agreeing with Karen that you can't really verify results too well in closed source software like Maple.


If two pieces of software developed independently get the same result, then I would tend to trust that result more than if one piece of software gave it. Of course, since Sage is open-source software, with many components been around a very long time, I expect some Maple developers have looked at some of the Sage code - some might even have written it.

Hence I don't think the development of Sage and Maple can be considered totally independent of each other. But getting identical results in the two pieces of software would certainly give me more confidence than I could ever get from Maple alone.

If his objective was to solve some well defined problem, he would simply reflect on the internal factors that generated the observed bugs and found a 'work around'.

Yes. I've hit several problems over many years with Mathematica on Solaris and have often found work-arounds for them. (Usually with the help of Sun employees).

http://www.g8wrb.org/mathematica/

Unlike Vladimir, I don't go around hunting for bugs, but if they crop up, I would try to find a solution.

His objective is to contribute to the evolution of Maple.

I'm not sure whether that is so. I've never quite understood his objectives. I've asked him and have never received a good answer.

His criticism is that as Maple evolves new bugs are created and not fix for years or never. I know the creators of Maple. They would likely criticize Bondarenko's critique of Maple in the following terms. They would say, "What's wrong with you? We are in the business of constantly expanding the domain of application of Maple. Bugs are universal and most find some kind of work around. The domain of application of Maple is constantly expanding so it is becoming monotonically more useful, because of our work. The bugs are just bugs to you, they are not bugs to everyone."

Finding workarounds is ok *if* you know there is a bug. But if software gives an incorrect result, which looks reasonable, you often will not look for a workaround as you will not realise there is a problem.

I suspect a lot of the bugs Vladimir finds are probably not likely to be met by users in general use, but clearly some are.

Vladimir never answered the question from William Stein about whether he had ever used Sage.

Vladimir is skilled with Maple. It would likely take him one man year to become proficient in Sage to the point where he could generate a similar critique of Sage. Why should he bother?

I've never quite understood Vladimir's objectives. If his objective is to make money from selling his skills, he definitely goes about it the wrong way. Hence I can't really answer why he might bother turning to Sage, since I don't know his objectives.

*Personally*, (and I'm not Vladamir) I would get some satisfaction from finding bugs in Sage and finding fixes for them. But I'm quite keen on open-source software, and have developed several pieces over the years

http://atlc.sourceforge.net/
http://witm.sourceforge.net/
http://chessdb.sourceforge.net/

Only last week I found a bug in part of Sage which prevented it compiling on Solaris. I found a workaround (simple as changing '==' for '=' in a script), and I know that bug will be fixed in the next release (3.0.2). Having access to the source code of open-source software, it is generally much easier to really get to the bottom of why a bug occurs.

I'm sure finding bugs in Sage, then finding fixes for them, would be more useful to humanity than endless rants about Maple to a huge number of irrelevant newsgroups.

Vladamir is often setting challenges for others (e.g. An exact simplification challenge ....). So perhaps he might like to challenge himself and turn his skills to improving open-source software. Done properly, I'm sure he could be of benefit to the open-source community. But he needs to change his methods considerably.
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