Talk:Scientific software

I wanted to be defensive ...
... therefore I put an extra mentioning of the belorussian company into the first item. Do not forget, that the main reason for this disambiguation page is to remove an commercial tasted link from a very central article.

But in order to remain partially balanced, I selected also a free and very outstanding, state of the art symbolic mathematical software which involves almost all the contemporary algorithmic results of the topic it specifically addresses.

At the present moment you can find two red links as well. I think, that the readers should be informed about the huge variety of the diverse scientific softwares. I do not plan a plain listing, rather some sort of guide for the non expert readers what can be done and what actually available as a scientific software.

prohlep (talk) 15:03, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

As the twin pages are in progress, one item, the superfluous extra mentioning of the belorussian company and their leading software product is moved into the twin pages.

prohlep (talk) 17:44, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

Merge
Not that I particularly think this article is likely to stand the test of time, but there is no need for separate sub-articles in the form of scientific software (free) and scientific software (non free) at this stage regardless. These should be merged until such point as size warrants splitting them. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 10:47, 5 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Agreed. The free one is practically empty, the non-free one is a summary of a handful of softwares which already have their own articles. The distinction between the two is only whether you have to pay for them or not. It may be possible to rescue this article if rewritten, in which case the content of the other two should be merged, and the examples provided should be replaced from a handful of summaries to a more exhaustive list of links, like the statistical software article, which, as you see, redirects to a list.--Boffob (talk) 16:12, 5 August 2008 (UTC)


 * I agree about a merge. The benefits of free vs non-free should probably be in articles about free software. Galoisgroupie (talk) 16:10, 21 October 2008 (UTC)


 * I see that this discussion is quite old so I did the merge myself. I haven't changed any content, that needs some more work. Galoisgroupie (talk) 16:27, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for merge suggestions
As you see, originally I did not plan to start any of the three pages in question. I simply wanted to remove something in an as defensive way as possible, see the top of this pages.

Thank you, for your valuable thoughts, Chris Cunningham and Boffob!

You made me explicit what was somehow in me, you see for example the obvious parallelism of the leads of the free and non-free pages.

I find the page List of statistical packages useful, what you gave as an example.

As my impression is that the both of you have more wiki experience concerning this kind of pages, concerning the preferable structure of this kind of pages, I ask you to carry over the alterations what you find appropriate, and later on I would rejoin the common improving effort.

As I am not a native English speaker, you can reformulate the sentences and paragraphs not only much faster than me, but the result will probably sound better. Hence feel yourself entirely free to reformulate, to delete or to do anything with the material of the existing three pages. Don't wait for my opinion, I agree in advance.

I had a conception what I try to sketch below, and I ask you to evaluate it, and if you agree with that conception, then I ask you somehow to incorporate this concept into your new merged version.

My personal experience and opinion is that there are typical advantages which tend to occur at non free softwares, and other advantages which tend to occur at the free softwares. There is a similar situation concerning the disadvantages. In overall, the free and non free softwares complement each other, and they together can cover the needs of a say working mathematician.

I hardly find any real interest conflict between the free and the non free world concerning the scientific softwares, the same can not be stated concerning non scientific softwares or operating systems. Hence I found it an interesting task to show the reader, that these two traditional enemies of each other are in a pretty well complementing situation in the case of scientific softwares. Due to the lack of real interest conflict, I can imagine a real evaluation of the two worlds with respect to this kind of softwares.

However the both of non free and free softwares are usually the result of tremendous amount of efforts, and therefore I simply did not want to put down any of them, end hence a planned to refrain from speaking about the weaknesses of the sofwares. In case of non free softwares I completely refrained from speaking about the drawbacks, I made a section about the benefits only. While as a free hearted man planned to be more free-spoken or honest concerning the free softwares, and you see my plan to tell a more complete truth about the free softwares:


 * Free benefits


 * Free drawbacks


 * Scientific benefits


 * Scientific drawbacks

Namely the benefits/drawbacks caused by the freeness (see The Cathedral and the Bazaar and many other resources and our personal scientific software writing efforts at our universities), and the benefits/drawbacks concerning the fact, that research scientists or their best friends are writing the scientific softwares, usually in very specialized topics.

In case of the non free software I planned to be much more close, since there writing the truth can cause market loss. Hence I wrote there everywhere the advantages only.

You mentioned that there are pages about all of the software I mentioned, yes! But those pages do not make any effort to put the diverse competing programs into at least a polite comparision.

My concept was to do something in between the almost row table of content alike list of links, like the page on statistical softwares mentioned above, and the separate standalone articles about each software. I.e.: to provide some kind of overview.

You in your own research subject probably have the same, that there are not only list of citations, and individual research papers, but time to time a few or half dozen of researcher join to write and overview paper what happened in their narrow subject in the last decade or half decade.

The reason to separate the free a non free was that it admits a cleaner view and comparing these two world without making a direct evaluation.

Just an example: coming home from an international competition in mathematics I asked my student in physics what kind of softwares they use, I simply imagined, that I am not well informed, and that is the reason why I do not know any non free general purpose non free softwares for researching physics. His answer is more or less equals to the Non mathematical systems section of the non free article! The Just an example: part of the last paragraph is actually the subject of his professor at our university.

As you mentioned, my list is far from being complete. Yes, as you can read at the top of this discussion page, I suddenly felt into the need to create these pages, and I do not think, that I know the whole selection of the more or less general purpose scientific softwares.

prohlep (talk) 19:09, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

What this article should be
I think this is a valuable article to exist, but I don't really see the point of having summaries of different sofwares that each have their own detailed pages. Perhaps what this article should do is list major genres of scientific software with a list of software that fits in each genre (some will be listed more than once) and link out to other pages when the genre already has an article eg statistics software?

I will come back and work on this unless there are different opinions. Galoisgroupie (talk) 16:32, 21 October 2008 (UTC)


 * I agree, this article should be a short description of what scientific software is, and then offer a list of such software, split whichever way seems best.--Boffob (talk) 16:58, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

Scientific Software
Is automated pilot system used Scientific Software.if not why .Pls help me to be defined. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.43.234.251 (talk) 09:31, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

Useless article full of nonsense
This article has nothing useful in it. It's just a waste of space, if no one has any idea about what *relevant* things can be written about the topic then it should be deleted.

Most of the text looks like space-filler, and says nothing. Is there a reason for listing some software packages (and not listing others), when we already have hundreds of software lists here (see Mathematical Software for some relevant lists)?

And what's this nonsense about "free and non free scientific software", and how "there is no collision between them"? Smells like some open source obsessed people didn't know what to do with their free time and instead of writing some useful code, attempted to impress their peculiar world view on an article that is *not* about open source. The result looks pretty clumsy. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.231.19.55 (talk) 12:58, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

Bad English throughout
The whole article is written with the concept of "one software, two softwares" -- but "software" is like "clothing" -- you don't have "one clothing, two clothings" you have "one piece or two pieces of clothing." The article seems confused generally or I would correct the grammar. Wlindley (talk) 14:09, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

This does *NOT* describe scientific software! Remove it!
It describes, at best, a small subset of algebraic math software that is rarely, if ever used by scientists outside of specific fields. What's more, it has no citations, is full of opinions, and blatantly wrong and misleading information. Someone please delete it. 64.9.242.22 (talk) 18:32, 14 March 2010 (UTC)

Please redirect to Mathematical_software, not to Computer_software
The current redirect from Scientific_software to Computer_software is a poor choice. The Computer_software page doesn't even mention science (except for two uses of "computer science").

Please change the redirect to Mathematical_software, which is much more appropriate.

Thanks. 174.3.187.31 (talk) 17:47, 7 March 2011 (UTC) -drb