This is a discussion by some Axiom developers about Sage from
> I think Axiom has some very good ideas, some of which have not yet really > found their way into other more modern languages, but the gap has narrowed > considerably in the last few years. And now there is a very active computer > algebra project called Sage doing almost all of the things that would really > be worth doing in Axiom, in Python instead. Sage got - in my opinion - two things right: it started by packaging many other excellent, specialised, programs with it, and it is lead by a charismatic, skilled person. Axiom, on the other hand, has the problem that it tried to do everything "in axiom", which works only if you have some 20 mathematicians and another 20 programmers available. In fact, it won't even work then.