www.sagemath.org
Has anyone ever used this Sage software - do you have any feedback on it, good/bad, etc? It looks like an open source alternative to Mathematica?
Sage is nice, and its functionality indeed overlaps with Mathematica in several aspects - it even supports kind of notebook interface, running in browser. There are differences, though. Sage is more like set of
Python interfaces to various (
Python or non-
Python) scientific packages, so it doesn't "feel" as monolitic package as Mathematica does. Further, Sage sorely lacks in documentation when compared to Mathematica. Also, while Sage 2D graphing capabilities are OK (Matlab-like plotting commands used), 3D graphic is IMO not even close to Mathematica. Then again, writing scripts for the system is in
Python, thus mostly in procedural/OO manner, which may fits some better than mostly functional approach to programming that is usually most natural to follow with Mathematica. Of course, Sage also has an advantage that it's free (although one should note that its authors do not care much about users being able to run it easily under Windows - I guess for some users this may be kind of dis-advantage), while Mathematica price tag is rather hefty.
So, it's hard to say overall how it fares against Mathematica. If you already know, and like
Python, and if you already used say numpy or Matplotlib
Python packages (which are Sage base packages), and if you're really on short bugdet, than you may like Sage; but if you already have experience with Mathematica, and if you could afford its price, then I'd say there is no reason (at least for now - note also that Sage is rather active project, so I'd expect it to improve significantly in coming years) to switch. But probably best thing to do is to try it, and decide for yourself.
