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

Mathematica Version 12 Released

blog.stephenwolfram.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 124 posts

Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released

#11

Post by carlob »

maliker wrote: post #8
mirekrusin wrote: post #5

I know I'm dreaming, Stephen is rather on the opposite side, but if he would open source it all/most of it, he'd be one of the most famous people around. I wonder how he'd move financially wise with that kind of bold move?

Seems like he's far from open sourcing it. His team just published a long blog post ( https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-op... ) explaining why they're closed source.

Honestly I read most of those reasons as reasons for not being free and community-driven as opposed to not being open-source, and also more as a post-hoc justification than a prediction on what will happen in the future.

As a matter of fact a large part of the Mathematica codebase is inspectable (the part that is written in Mathematica itself) [1].

Disclaimer: I'm a Wolfram employee, but these are my opinions and any decision on open sourcing the language would be way above my pay grade.

[1] https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/1742/what-is...

Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released

#12

Post by jordigh »

mirekrusin wrote: post #5

I know I'm dreaming, Stephen is rather on the opposite side, but if he would open source it all/most of it, he'd be one of the most famous people around. I wonder how he'd move financially wise with that kind of bold move?

Maple got really close to being freed a long time ago, before they were bought by that Taiwanese Terminator company (Cyberdyne systems, or whatever they're called). I can't find a reference for it now, but one of the Maple admins said so in an interview.

Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released

#13

Post by jordigh »

carlob wrote: post #11
maliker wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like he's far from open sourcing it. His team just published a long blog post ( https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-op... ) explaining why they're closed source.

Honestly I read most of those reasons as reasons for not being free and community-driven as opposed to not being open-source, and also more as a post-hoc justification than a prediction on what will happen in the future. As a matter of fact a large part of the Mathematica codebase is inspectable (the part that is written in Mathematica itself) [1]. Disclaimer: I'm a Wolfram employee, but these are my opinions and any…

Most of Matlab's source code is visible too and its license allows you to modify its visible source code and share it with other license holders too.

But that's still not enough and that's why I still sometimes work on Octave (although I've been semi-inactive for the past few years). Freedom isn't a spectrum; it really is all or nothing. Unless we're all free all the way, none of us is. It's not fair of me to share Matlab or Mathematica source code with people who cannot have access to the software that runs it, especially from a mathematical and scientific point of view where reproducibility in software should allow anyone to acquire that software.

Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released

#14

Post by [deleted] »

maliker wrote: post #8
mirekrusin wrote: post #5

I know I'm dreaming, Stephen is rather on the opposite side, but if he would open source it all/most of it, he'd be one of the most famous people around. I wonder how he'd move financially wise with that kind of bold move?

Seems like he's far from open sourcing it. His team just published a long blog post ( https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-op... ) explaining why they're closed source.

[deleted]

Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released

#15

Post by gmiller123456 »

enriquto wrote: post #10
maliker wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like he's far from open sourcing it. His team just published a long blog post ( https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-op... ) explaining why they're closed source.

wow, I was expecting an intelligent list of reasons why he cannot explain how mathematica works internally (I'm sure there are many). Instead, this post is a ridiculous strawman argument against the open development model. For all the reasons he says, he could perfectly publish the source code of mathematica (e.g. under the AGPL) but still do not accept external pull requests. There are many successful open-source/cl…

I think you misinterpreted his point. It's not that he can't give Mathematica away as it stands now. His point is more that Mathematica couldn't be developed as a free and open project with just contributions from random people.

The point he doesn't mention is that it costs money to develop it closed source, and giving away the source (or even the binary) would cut off funding. I'm obliged to agree with him, since there isn't anything free that comes close to Mathematica.

Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released

#16

Post by IshKebab »

jordigh wrote: post #13
carlob wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I read most of those reasons as reasons for not being free and community-driven as opposed to not being open-source, and also more as a post-hoc justification than a prediction on what will happen in the future. As a matter of fact a large part of the Mathematica codebase is inspectable (the part that is written in Mathematica itself) [1]. Disclaimer: I'm a Wolfram employee, but these are my opinions and any…

Most of Matlab's source code is visible too and its license allows you to modify its visible source code and share it with other license holders too. But that's still not enough and that's why I still sometimes work on Octave (although I've been semi-inactive for the past few years). Freedom isn't a spectrum; it really is all or nothing. Unless we're all free all the way, none of us is. It's not fair of me to share M…

That's not true at all. Lots of the actual Matlab code (i.e. code written in matlab) is available. But none of Matlab itself is. That's where their value is. Octave has fairly easily replicated a huge amount of the mathsy part, but is their GUI or plotting code any good? Not when I last tried it.

Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released

#17

Post by limeblack »

mirekrusin wrote: post #5

I know I'm dreaming, Stephen is rather on the opposite side, but if he would open source it all/most of it, he'd be one of the most famous people around. I wonder how he'd move financially wise with that kind of bold move?

https://mathics.github.io/ is open source partial clone. Frankly with out a source of income it wouldn't be what it is today.

Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released

#18

Post by alok-g »

copperx wrote: post #4

I encourage everyone to watch at least one of the many livestreams[1] that Stephen Wolfram did while putting together this release. They changed my perception of Stephen, which I had gotten from the critiques of him that are everywhere on the internet. He is perpetually obsessed with his creation and does not accept mediocrity from his developers; but does so without attacking or belittling anyone, or feeling superio…

I have attended a live session from him and also spoken to him.

He did live coding for the demos where for any session of similar complexity the speakers just copy-paste pre-written snippets. It shows both his genius as well as the capabilities of Mathematica.

At one point, his code wasn't doing what he thought it should. His reaction was that of a pure engineer, with no trace of masking or downplaying the issue.

He was asked the same usual questions around open-sourcing, et al. His answer was simple and sensible: That what they are doing cannot be done without a commercial setting. He said that he would rather do a better job for the customers than spend time on anything else.

Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released

#19

Post by mschuetz »

Might seem dumb but the thing that drove me away from Mathematica are the stylesheets. Mathematica used to have a useful stylesheet that visibly separated input, output and text content. But at some point, I think version 8 or 9, they removed that stylesheet. All the remaining stylesheets either don't properly distinguish input and output, or look like crap.

I lost interest in reinstalling that stylesheet whenever I had to install Mathematica on a new system and consequently, I lost interest in Mathematica. Wish they'd reintroduce it as an easily selectable default sheet. Jupyter has a much better default stylesheet but Jupyter lacks ease of use and functionality.

Edit: The stylesheet I'm talking about was called NaturalColor and there even is a stackexchange thread about its disappearance. https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/17323/did-ma...

Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released

#20

Post by [deleted] »

IshKebab wrote: post #16
jordigh wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of Matlab's source code is visible too and its license allows you to modify its visible source code and share it with other license holders too. But that's still not enough and that's why I still sometimes work on Octave (although I've been semi-inactive for the past few years). Freedom isn't a spectrum; it really is all or nothing. Unless we're all free all the way, none of us is. It's not fair of me to share M…

That's not true at all. Lots of the actual Matlab code (i.e. code written in matlab) is available. But none of Matlab itself is. That's where their value is. Octave has fairly easily replicated a huge amount of the mathsy part, but is their GUI or plotting code any good? Not when I last tried it.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN