Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Version 11 of Mathematica

blog.wolfram.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 106 posts

Re: Version 11 of Mathematica

#81

Post by sbmassey »

phonon wrote: post #80
sbmassey wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A home edition without support is $95, for the record Correction: that is the upgrade price, my mistake

That's the upgrade price. The home version is $295 (for the record.) https://www.wolfram.com/mathematica-home-edition/

Oh ok, sorry

Re: Version 11 of Mathematica

#82

Post by dr_zoidberg »

Mathnerd314 wrote: post #37
mathattack wrote: post #21

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 kind of the opposite of "the bleeding edge". If you want the latest algorithms, statistics, etc., those will be found in R, C++, Python etc. in the author's website. If you want well-tested, mostly-robust algorithms, those (might) be in Mathematica; they follow innovation, rather than leading it. Mathematica also has some algorithms from the 70's and 80's that aren't widely available as open source, an…

>> The part I've found most useful has been Wolfram|Alpha; it's really nice to be able to say "August 2, 2016 - September 4, 2017" and get back the number of days, weeks, and hours between those two times.

In Python:

    import datetime  # standard module
    timedelta = datetime.datetime(2016, 8, 2) - datetime.datetime(2017, 9, 4)
    timedelta.days
    > -398
    timedelta.days / 7
    > -57
    timedelta.days / 7.
    > -56.857142857142854
    timedelta.total_seconds() / 3600.
    > -9552.0
In particular, that you can pretty much ask anything to Wolfram|Alpha, and that it has to figure out exactly what you're asking (and I admit most of the time, it does it), always seemed more like a marketting ploy than a real feature to me. I can't go as far as saying that I dislike it, but the few times I tried to use it, it didn't get what I was trying to "ask" and I just gave up.

--> I also admit it might be me that I just don't get the tool.

Re: Version 11 of Mathematica

#83

Post by belazeebub »

SSLy wrote: post #59
sp332 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

source?

WWDC 2005: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcfGsOKXO5M

Re: Version 11 of Mathematica

#84

Post by vessenes »

mathattack wrote: post #21

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?

One thing people often miss talking about Mathematica is that the core math notebook features, 3d plotting, symbolic algebra tools have all been available since the early 1990s.

Seriously, that's a long time, and a lot of user hours and development have gone into Mathematica. It's not perfect, it's not for everyone, I don't currently have a license, but to my mind, it's the gold standard for interactive notebook type math and science where you will never have to wedge in some weird plugin, deal with a library incompatibility, just go.

Re: Version 11 of Mathematica

#86

Post by hooloovoo_zoo »

perlgeek wrote: post #61

Somehow the mixing of computation and data sources makes me uneasy. 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 f…

An even worse problem is that you occasionally lose support for some data entirely. A while back I was playing with some historical stock data and when I went to run the notebook again some time later Mathematica no longer had data for the tickers I was trying to lookup.

Re: Version 11 of Mathematica

#87

Post by backslash_16 »

quantumhobbit wrote: post #74
pmiller2 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Generally I prefer small, simple languages. I would argue that MMA is a small language hiding behind a gigantic, domain-specific library.

It helps that the huge library has some of the best documentation I've ever encountered.

If a massive standard library, or really any library, doesn't have good documentation how do you find out about it?

In some statically typed languages like C# and Java you can use an IDE's object or interface explorer to see what the classes, methods, and properties of a class lib are. If that's missing do you have to use introspection or reflection? In a REPL if the language has one?

Is it assumed a compiled language will be statically typed (though that doesn't have to be true) and if it's not the source code will come with any library so examining it is easy?

Re: Version 11 of Mathematica

#88

Post by zump »

dr_zoidberg wrote: post #82
Mathnerd314 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mathematica is kind of the opposite of "the bleeding edge". If you want the latest algorithms, statistics, etc., those will be found in R, C++, Python etc. in the author's website. If you want well-tested, mostly-robust algorithms, those (might) be in Mathematica; they follow innovation, rather than leading it. Mathematica also has some algorithms from the 70's and 80's that aren't widely available as open source, an…

>> The part I've found most useful has been Wolfram|Alpha; it's really nice to be able to say "August 2, 2016 - September 4, 2017" and get back the number of days, weeks, and hours between those two times. In Python: import datetime # standard module timedelta = datetime.datetime(2016, 8, 2) - datetime.datetime(2017, 9, 4) timedelta.days > -398 timedelta.days / 7 > -57 timedelta.days / 7. > -56.857142857142854 timede…

Yuck.

Re: Version 11 of Mathematica

#89

Post by maverick_iceman »

mathattack wrote: post #21

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?

Heavy duty symbolic math, say calculations in General Relativity or Feynman diagrams.

Re: Version 11 of Mathematica

#90

Post by Myrmornis »

mathattack wrote: post #21

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?

Symbolic algebra. I think you may be confusing numerical scientific computing with symbolic algebra. In the science/math/stats realm the tools you mention (e.g. R and python) do numerical computing. They only have symbolic computing as add-on packages (e.g. sympy). Mathematica is the world's most capable symbolic algebra system by a long way. It can also do numerical operations similar to what R and python can do, but I doubt it has the statistical breadth of R.
Post reply on HN