51–60 of 78 posts
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What about http://rsymbolic.org and obviously symPy ?
> symPy ? Uhm... it says right at the top of the linked website that sympy is used as the backend.
Remember I'm not qualifying the value of this project as a replacement to Mathematica. I'm asking who is the segment bthat would use this as opposed to going directly to symPy or R.
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And yet Mathematica is not nearly as effective as math when done by pencil, paper, and a trained mathematician. The value of maths is 1) it's "open-source", 2) it's free to use, 3) if you want to switch from one module to another (say, number theory to category theory) you are able to do so using the same tools (pencil, paper, and a trained mathematician), and so long as the two "modules" are inter-operable it flows…
I like Mathematica and find it a sometimes, very useful tool. I've taken over two dozen University courses in mathematics, including topology, abstract algebra, analysis, combinatorics, number theory, etc. Yet, even simply equations can stump my rather meager ability to solve them and this is where Mathematica is so useful. You can use it interactively to quickly traverse the difficult ground on the way to insight or…
Mathematica is a very complex piece of software. As an ex-physicist there's no way I would trust this completely unknown open source alternative.
But it's open source, and you can review what you'd like. You're unable to do that with Mathematica.
Mathematica is a very complex piece of software. As an ex-physicist there's no way I would trust this completely unknown open source alternative.
You shouldn't trust Mathematica either. It has had bugs in the past [0]. Also it didn't have a proper "undo" feature until a year or so ago, which is pretty embarrassing. [0] http://www.ams.org/notices/201410/rnoti-p1249.pdf
Genuine question - what is the use of all these versus something like R or Pandas that is actually usable in production as well. What is missing in R/Pandas that makes people choose other pieces of software that does something very similar? Commercial versions of software probably has an edge in support/performance/libraries...Or (as with Simulink ) provides a very specific piece of functionality or integration. But…
Symbolic manipulation. That's the only reason Mathematica is used in academia. If you're in the academia and want to do numeric computations you would use something like R or Matlab.
Sage / Sagecloud is quite popular in academics in the Czech Republic.
Yes bug Sage is weird. It's a sewed together giant of multiple parts, and the seams are quite apparent. It's also hard to install and get started with.
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Barrier of entry would be what I would consider the primary use case for using all of these vs Pandas and R. If we look at Mathics only, it features a Mathematica compatible syntax which allows users familiar with the syntax to be up, running and productive with the tool much quicker. Mathics also provides a notebook, however others do as well as optional downloads. R has RStudio, and you can use Jupyter for Pandas.
Interesting. But then my question is how big is the user base that WANTS to use Mathematica but cannot AFFORD it? Because for a first time user just hunting for a symbolic math, the buy in might not be there.
Mathematica is a very complex piece of software. As an ex-physicist there's no way I would trust this completely unknown open source alternative.
You shouldn't trust Mathematica either. It has had bugs in the past [0]. Also it didn't have a proper "undo" feature until a year or so ago, which is pretty embarrassing. [0] http://www.ams.org/notices/201410/rnoti-p1249.pdf
Mathematica is a very complex piece of software. As an ex-physicist there's no way I would trust this completely unknown open source alternative.
But it's open source, and you can review what you'd like. You're unable to do that with Mathematica.
Sage / Sagecloud is quite popular in academics in the Czech Republic.
In fact, I'm pretty confused as to why someone would go to the trouble of trying to write a new, python-based mathematica alternative with Sage already quite established and equally free. (I guess keeping the Mathematica language is a motivation for someone who's tied to the mathematica world already, but I've always found it to be a write-only language...)