[HN Gopher] My Path to Magma
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       My Path to Magma
        
       Author : lukastyrychtr
       Score  : 29 points
       Date   : 2021-12-04 21:17 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (blainehansen.me)
 (TXT) w3m dump (blainehansen.me)
        
       | kjhughes wrote:
       | The Magma name appears to require disambiguation:
       | 
       | His Magma programming language
       | (https://github.com/blainehansen/magma):
       | 
       |  _The goal of this project is to: create a programming language
       | and surrounding education /tooling ecosystem capable of making
       | formal verification and provably correct software mainstream and
       | normal among working software engineers._
       | 
       | Magma computer algebra system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magm
       | a_(computer_algebra_system...):
       | 
       |  _Magma is a computer algebra system designed to solve problems
       | in algebra, number theory, geometry and combinatorics. It is
       | named after the algebraic structure magma. It runs on Unix-like
       | operating systems, as well as Windows._
        
         | trylfthsk wrote:
         | And here I was hoping someone was deep diving the prog rock
         | rabbit-hole:
         | 
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magma_(band)
        
         | jdougan wrote:
         | My first thought was the Magma object database
         | https://github.com/magma-database/magma
        
         | CJefferson wrote:
         | I was just about to post the same thing. I don't like picking
         | on things like names, but the "old magma" is still very popular
         | in mathematics.
        
           | joppy wrote:
           | I heard from a friend (have not verified myself) that the
           | paper in which the Magma computer algebra system was
           | introduced is the most-cited paper in the whole of pure
           | mathematics.
        
             | williamstein wrote:
             | There is a discussion about how to define this and a
             | comment concluding that indeed by one metric the Magma
             | paper is most cited here:
             | https://mathoverflow.net/questions/199978/the-most-cited-
             | pap...
             | 
             | John Cannon, who started Magma, pushed very hard for people
             | to cite that paper whenever they used Magma in a paper. We
             | eventually did something similar with SageMath for a bit,
             | but it felt weird having everybody cite a paper with me
             | personally as the main author, when there are nearly 1000
             | contributors to Sage, so we made up a reference with the
             | author "The Sage Developers", or something like that. As a
             | result there is probably no MathSciNet entry tracking
             | citations to Sagemath even though many papers cite
             | Sagemath.
        
       | exdsq wrote:
       | Does this offer any advantages to Ada/Spark? Having worked in
       | formal method environments there's a lot to be said of a tool
       | that's been around for a while. Even with formal methods you can
       | still have bugs and there's a risk in using new tools. Without
       | getting those millions of hours of development time it's hard to
       | know a tool really works regardless of the theory behind it.
        
         | deltaonefour wrote:
         | Yeah, he talks as if this hasn't been tried before. See agda or
         | Idris.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | mleonhard wrote:
       | I like this idea. I hope to use the language someday and
       | translate (upgrade) my Rust code to it.
        
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       (page generated 2021-12-05 23:02 UTC)