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Show HN: Woxi - Open-source Mathematica / Wolfram Language reimplementation

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Re: Show HN: Woxi - Open-source Mathematica / Wolfram Language reimplementation

#11

Post by jshaqaw »

adius wrote: post #8
jshaqaw wrote: post #5

I’m going to get hate here but what the heck I have karma points to burn. What I have to say is not a critique of this particular project which seems nicely done but a general statement on open source. I’d rather see more open source projects making something new than so much “Open Source reimplementation.” If closed proprietary companies are so worthless then why do so many open source projects copy those implementa…

I think the Wolfram Language got 80–90% of it right, and that's why I want to reimplement and use it in the first place. It bothers me that I have to use inferior solutions, such as those implemented in Python and Julia, just because the better solution is prohibitively expensive. Of course, there are a few things I think we can do better than the Wolfram Language, but given all the available legacy code, there's rea…

Good points all. Please understand this is more of a general open source friendly criticism I made. There is good value in preserving access to codebases made for Wolfram language which is expensive albeit they do offer decent licenses now to mess around with it.

I’m curious abut benchmarking. Wolfram claims they put a ton of effort into optimizing the speed of at least certain types of mathematical computations.

UX is an area I’d suggest working on. Wolfram was a real pioneer with the notebook style interface but nothing is meant to last forever. That might be an area to innovate without losing access to legacy codebases.

Re: Show HN: Woxi - Open-source Mathematica / Wolfram Language reimplementation

#12

Post by mvdwoord »

jshaqaw wrote: post #5

I’m going to get hate here but what the heck I have karma points to burn. What I have to say is not a critique of this particular project which seems nicely done but a general statement on open source. I’d rather see more open source projects making something new than so much “Open Source reimplementation.” If closed proprietary companies are so worthless then why do so many open source projects copy those implementa…

Not mutually exclusive? The fact that money is being paid for some closed source product does at least prove there is an actual demand for whatever they figured out to do, and how. So either a marginal improvement, or simply open sourcing a subset of an existing product, or making something completely new, or better... all good isn't it?

Maybe reimplementing something that already exists a couple times over leads to good things as well. I can imagine some subtle insights could be gained which matter to some of the user base.

Re: Show HN: Woxi - Open-source Mathematica / Wolfram Language reimplementation

#13

Post by deckar01 »

jshaqaw wrote: post #5

I’m going to get hate here but what the heck I have karma points to burn. What I have to say is not a critique of this particular project which seems nicely done but a general statement on open source. I’d rather see more open source projects making something new than so much “Open Source reimplementation.” If closed proprietary companies are so worthless then why do so many open source projects copy those implementa…

Closed source, proprietary license, starting at $195/year. Their language is a moat for customers, and this is a bridge back out. If you aren’t getting any benefit from their development direction and the compute is happening on your own hardware, what are you paying a subscription for?

Re: Show HN: Woxi - Open-source Mathematica / Wolfram Language reimplementation

#14

Post by adius »

Y_Y wrote: post #3

Can it run Rubi? https://rulebasedintegration.org/

Yes, Rubi mostly works by now! Performance is still a concern, but we're working on improving it. I'll add some information on how to best use Rubi to the documentation soon. I already have a draft, but didn't find the time to finish it, yet.

Re: Show HN: Woxi - Open-source Mathematica / Wolfram Language reimplementation

#15

Post by bobajeff »

As sometime who's never used Wolfram Languages before this project has gotten me interested.

For sometime now I've been looking into a good CAS for my app. I've tried a few algebra problems with Sympy, Sage, Xcas, Maxima and Woxi. Of these only Sage, Maxima and Woxi were capable of giving the expected answers.

After trying it out I became fascinated by Wolfram language and other term rewriting languages they are pretty interesting even though most have little to do with CAS like WL.

Anyway I've been looking at this project and plan to seriously use it in the future. So, I've noticed a few things when attempting to run wljs (I had to wrap it with a shell script to get wljs to see it as wolframscript executable). First the version number system variable gives a string instead of the expected real number type (As a temporary hack I modified Woxi to give what wljs expects). There also is a variable that tells to the absolute path of the of the current file and it is wrong when it's used in an imported script. After working around that with hard coded paths things became more difficult.

Edit: just checked my pc and the variables are called $VersionNumber and $InputFileName which is incorrect if the file is evaluated via Get["filepath"].

Anyways, I'm interested in helping out don't know if I can.

Re: Show HN: Woxi - Open-source Mathematica / Wolfram Language reimplementation

#16

Post by pama »

adius wrote: post #10
pama wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You now fully support version 1.0. IIRC, the first version of Mathematica I used back in early 1993 was 2.1 soon followed by 2.2, which was useful for a couple of years. How much extra work is it to reach full compatibility with that version? (I had used MathLink at the time.)

We currently support almost everything up to version 6.0. Here is a detailed comparison with all Mathematica versions: https://woxi.ad-si.com/docs/comparison/mathematica/ However, MathLink is one of the few exceptions as it is deprecated by now.

Thanks

Re: Show HN: Woxi - Open-source Mathematica / Wolfram Language reimplementation

#19

Post by rpdillon »

jshaqaw wrote: post #5

I’m going to get hate here but what the heck I have karma points to burn. What I have to say is not a critique of this particular project which seems nicely done but a general statement on open source. I’d rather see more open source projects making something new than so much “Open Source reimplementation.” If closed proprietary companies are so worthless then why do so many open source projects copy those implementa…

I mean, you're basically asking why people don't do high-quality original work and give it away for free, as opposed to copying something that's successful and giving it away for free.

The answer in my mind is fairly obvious: it's far more difficult and risky to do high-quality original work and give it away for free. If you want to see more original innovative work in open source, the two main ways to achieve that are to either do it yourself, or to pay others to do it.

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