61–70 of 106 posts
In classical Mathematica, you could be pretty sure that computations with future versions would give the same output. Now what happens when, for example, the average size of an egg increases over time, and then with version 12 the data is updated, and suddenly your notebooks give different results when you rerun them.
Also, where does the data come from? Can you use it as a base for scientific publications?
An open question independent of the author: What do people use Mathematica for that can't be done in R, SAS, Matlab, SPSS or Python libraries. Is it a great innovation that other tools have caught up with, or is it still getting a lot of use at the bleeding edge?
Mathematica is squarely on my "stuff I'd buy if I had cash to spare" category. I use Jupyter on a daily basis for a few different languages and it's improving steadily every month, but I kind of wish I was using Mathematica instead most of the time. As it is, I poke at it occasionally on a Raspberry Pi (which is now mostly fast enough) and wonder wistfully what it would be like to run on an i7 (or, rather, a cluster…
have you tried the free version on the cloud? www.wolfram.com/development-platform/ definitely recommend playing around.
I wonder if any of you use it recreationally, at home. Is it worth buying, assuming you have some spare cash?
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> What do people use Mathematica for that can't be done in R, SAS, Matlab, SPSS or Python libraries. Nothing; but Mathematica has been the tool of choice for cs education (or math+cs) and people tend to stick to what they know.
I think you're thinking of Matlab. Mathematica isn't particularly huge in education (yet).
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have you tried the free version on the cloud? www.wolfram.com/development-platform/ definitely recommend playing around.
I would use it if it didn't prompt me to upgrade to a paid plan every 10 seconds or so...
An open question independent of the author: What do people use Mathematica for that can't be done in R, SAS, Matlab, SPSS or Python libraries. Is it a great innovation that other tools have caught up with, or is it still getting a lot of use at the bleeding edge?
Lets say you want to build some fancy DIY project, like a food dehydrator. You want to make some mathematical models of the thing, so you pull up Mathematica. To start with, maybe you want to solve some simple mass and energy balances on the thing to find out how much power it will take, and how long it will need to run. No problem, Mathematica does basic algebra right out of the box. It's also got a nice units syste…
That being said, from my experience Mathematica is best for prototyping or research. Once you know what you are doing it makes sense to redo everything in C/C++ (or your other favorite static typing language) for production or client use.
Would have been great if this version fixed the syntax. Square brackets for function arguments makes no sense, neither mathematically, nor programming language wise :) Same for Sin requiring a capital letter, and curly braces instead of square brackets for matrices
Square brackets – one keypress. Curly brackets – two keypresses, shift and the other bracket key. Result: reserved key for brackets, instead of mixing brackets and numbers while making the only kind of bracket an entire key more to get to. Evaluation: it's clean and efficient.
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I doubt it. I think the big take away lesson from the language specific machines was that it's not worth it. LOTS of money is spent on the R&D that goes into making x86, ARM, etc. faster and better each iteration, and without the economies of scale that come with a huge install base, it's basically just a money pit. Even if a dedicated Mathematica CPU was faster now, the x86 version will be faster in a few years anyw…
A lot of Mathematica is already written in Mathematica. When Apple switched Macs to Intel CPUs, they included Mathematica as a flagship program, and flew their engineers out to do a port in secret. One engineer said the hardest part of the port was deciding what to do with the rest of the weekend.