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Comment by limeblack | Hacker News Reader

https://mathics.github.io/ is open source partial clone. Frankly with out a source of income it wouldn't be what it is today.

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Mathics is neat, but it is mostly an interface for a small part of the Sympy library and tries to mimic in a partial ad-hoc way the Mathematica syntax. Mathics also seems to be on life-support in terms of developer activity.

Sympy or Sage are much better examples of open source computer algebra systems, but they lack the pattern-matching weirdly-lispy language design of Mathematica (the Wolfram language, which while certainly weird, is very powerful).

And William Stein (founder of SageMath) just quit his tenured professor position at UW to continue working on CoCalc: http://blog.sagemath.com/2019/04/12/should-i-resign-from-my-...

This morning one of my Ph.D. students (Kevin Lui) said to me, "I may have to implement this [number theory] algorithm for my thesis using Magma, because [some number theory algorithm] is broken in Sage." My visible continued failure to make Sage a viable alternative to commercial closed source math software almost made me cry...

How do you feel about the OSCAR [1] project? It is similar to Sage in its mission, although smaller in scope, I guess. And it looks like they were able to secure significant funding (at least for the duration of the project).

Not sure what else is different, besides using Julia as the glue language, rather than Python/Cython.

[1] https://oscar.computeralgebra.de/

I'm very excited about the OSCAR project. It could be very helpful down the road to the overall goal of creating a free open source viable alternative to Mathematics, etc...

For what is worth, even if it is not perfected yet, SAGE is nonetheless already an amazing achievement that has helped me in my studies.

I can second that :-) It empowered me to do casual Gröbner basis computations without learning a new tool/language (Singular).

Is CoCalc generating more funding for the development of Sage?

Not yet. That was why I started CoCalc.

I'm rooting for you.

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