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Comment by adenadel | Hacker News Reader

I'm really disappointed (with my impression) that UW doesn't seem to appreciate what has been accomplished with Sage and the value of a major open source competitor to Mathematica, Maple, Matlab, etc. I hope William and Cocalc are tremendously successful.

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If I'm reading the article right, he's only done work for UW for one out of the last 5 years. That seems to me to be an enormous amount of flexibility on their part.

Yes, that's correct. The math department has been as flexible and supportive as they can possibly be. They won't let me be on unpaid leave again only because the university won't. However, it's not like the mathematics department at UW has a lot of money just laying around. I don't think they have even a single position that is paid for by an endowment. It's very different than other departments I've been at. I was Harvard University's math department for five years, and they had far more discretionary money than UW math; also other organizations on campus such as Computer Science have received significant donations. The mathematics department's money comes mainly from the school allocating funding in exchange for teaching many important courses.

Yes, but you'd think the university could find a way to directly support building the software.

I used to think that too. I only started CoCalc when I realized after a decade that this probably wasn't going to happen (for me).

UW as an institution cares mainly about getting all that Silicon Valley they saw Stanford get from Google and followers, so they can find administrators and build fancy buildings, not about research and education. Non-commercial research and teaching has been on a long decline, sustained only by previously tenured professors.

It's a university. Work for UW is supposed to be generating valuable research and education, which is what Sage and Cocalc do.

I think this is a sad reminder that as a developer just because you add value, doesnt mean you will be able to capture it. There is a tragedy of commons at play for tools, most of us (including companies) are unwilling to pay good money for good tools.

To add to his accomplishments, Sage was a pioneer of the web-based client/server notebook model now popular in Jupyter. I'm not sure if Sage was THE first instance of this, but certainly one of the first.

Well to be fair Mathematica had a client server notebook architecture since early on. Today it also supports a web fronted besides the now (QT based?) native client. The native client is way more powerful and performant than anything that Jupyter offers and can be extended in the client Language itself. IPython/Jupyter is a more or less direct copy of Mathematica's interaction pattern but as is often the case a poor imitation in many regards.

As a comparison https://observablehq.com seems like a genuine novel take on the notebook pattern and is unsurprisingly a commercial effort with some open source components.

Thanks! You're referring to the Sage notebook, and the key feature is that it is web-based with some collaboration support. I believe it was the first instance of this at the level of sophistication that it attained, which was significant given the web development tools available a decade ago. I started sagenb in 2006 after seeing a demo of a local OS X frontend for IPython. I did a huge amount of work on it, but there were also many students who did too (e.g., a 16-year old in the Philippines named Tim Dumol). The Sage notebook (and IPython) was very much inspired by Mathematica, Macsyma, and Emacs. Jupyter notebook was written a few years later, and has a more modern architecture (it used websockets). Jupyter has a much newer client called JupyterLab, which uses more modern Javascript tooling, including Typescript, WebPack, Phosphor, and so on. I've been working hard to make CoCalc fully support the Jupyter ecosystem, since I love the momentum behind it and how inclusive the community is. In particular, I wrote a new Jupyter client that supports realtime collaboration.

That's what happens when faculty give up administrative decision making power to a professional bureaucrat class.

Did they give it up, or did the Legislature hijack it? Who appoints the people who run the university?

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