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Does anyone remember his book "A New Kind of Science" which was a really discredited, unoriginal, hack-fraudish, non-scientifically vetted essay on cellular automata?
For the greater good of the world he shouldn't OSS it, but make it free! I'm mostly a R/Python statistics type, but a multi-day course in Mathematica left me in awe. It is great software. The way you could make models dynamic in a user interface kind of way was way ahead of it's time. It's pricing was prohibitive though and we chose not to pursue it.
"9.0 Open source doesn’t bring major tech innovation to market". You have to have some balls to say that. Major mathematical libraries used in HPC are OSS.
Linux is an example of an open source project with centralized design & management and a unified vision. Mathematica is a brilliant product, and more people would use it if it was open source but it's ok that's it not.
Linux also has the (unique to it) idea that the kernel and the rest of the OS are not the same thing. There is no other integration point than the ABI for userspace.
And OTOH, Linux userspace is ridiculously de-centralized. There's competing distros, init systems, C runtimes, memory allocators, filesystems, etc.
And that's not even taking into account the absolute chaos of the Linux desktop.
For the greater good of the world he shouldn't OSS it, but make it free! I'm mostly a R/Python statistics type, but a multi-day course in Mathematica left me in awe. It is great software. The way you could make models dynamic in a user interface kind of way was way ahead of it's time. It's pricing was prohibitive though and we chose not to pursue it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed. And what nonsense about cohesive design. There's nothing cohesive about the design of Wolfram functions and parameters. Often, they're not even documented! Wolfram is just a huge proprietary library. It's arguably not a language at all. And it has an appalling UI that makes it unsuited for building modern apps for others.
Agreed. It definitely has its uses, but it lacks the self-consistency needed to be a language. Alot of this is for understandable historical reasons, but it has never been smoothed out as it would be in a project with more community involvement. Again that's ok. Maybe we need something to be to mathematica as octave is to matlab.
That you haven't heard of it is perhaps telling.
Does anyone remember his book "A New Kind of Science" which was a really discredited, unoriginal, hack-fraudish, non-scientifically vetted essay on cellular automata?
For the greater good of the world he shouldn't OSS it, but make it free! I'm mostly a R/Python statistics type, but a multi-day course in Mathematica left me in awe. It is great software. The way you could make models dynamic in a user interface kind of way was way ahead of it's time. It's pricing was prohibitive though and we chose not to pursue it.
Mathematica is free on any Raspberry Pi.
My point was to combine a compliment (it's a truly awesome set of tools) with a gripe (the pricing is so prohibitive, even decision makers in pretty cost-oblivious organisations cringe when hearing the fees).
I dare say any financial organisation could replace the multilanguaged hell that is user built software by Mathematica and leap forward. It's the licensing cost that make Mathematica a niche product. Microsoft could buy Mathematica and integrate it with Excel (again, partly in jest).
For the greater good of the world he shouldn't OSS it, but make it free! I'm mostly a R/Python statistics type, but a multi-day course in Mathematica left me in awe. It is great software. The way you could make models dynamic in a user interface kind of way was way ahead of it's time. It's pricing was prohibitive though and we chose not to pursue it.
Out of curiosity, what did you do? Symbolic analysis?