Shift in focus
Learning from the experience of diminishing popularity, developers of this software are now shifting their focus to the following three categories of users: engineers employed in various industries, researchers in mathematics who are now not using this software and students in STEM courses.
Among these, the most promising group is the students who take undergraduate STEM courses. For a student who studies electronics engineering, purchase of a computation tool like MATLAB is not that feasible. Here comes the relevance of an open source alternative like SageMath.
Moreover, open source tools allow access to the source code, which is invaluable when it comes to the learning experience.
Last, but not the least, in classrooms, you need not worry about state-of-art performance that the industry demands. Summing it all up, the shift in focus to cater to the academia more will be the game changer in favour of SageMath in the near future.
The author is assistant professor, department of ECE at SETCEM, Thrissur
