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Mathematica Version 12 Released

blog.stephenwolfram.com

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Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released

#41

Post by JorgeGT »

jakobegger wrote: post #39

I wish Mathematica was more affordable. I loved using it as a student, but now I can no longer afford it. A professional license costs 3500€. Which is probably worth it if you use it every day, but not so much if you just use it just once a month to make a graph or integrate something. They have a "hobby" license for 350€, which is reasonable, but according to their license it can't be used for anything work related.…

There's always Mathematica for the Raspberry Pi, completely free for personal use! https://www.wolfram.com/raspberry-pi/

Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released

#42

Post by blt »

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…

I agree with you. I stopped using Matlab for my academic work because I don't consider the results reproducible. Of course, that hasn't stopped 99.5% of control theorists, but every bit of useful code released in the open source alternative makes it easier to switch.

Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released

#43

Post by jakobegger »

JorgeGT wrote: post #41
jakobegger wrote: post #39

I wish Mathematica was more affordable. I loved using it as a student, but now I can no longer afford it. A professional license costs 3500€. Which is probably worth it if you use it every day, but not so much if you just use it just once a month to make a graph or integrate something. They have a "hobby" license for 350€, which is reasonable, but according to their license it can't be used for anything work related.…

There's always Mathematica for the Raspberry Pi, completely free for personal use! https://www.wolfram.com/raspberry-pi/

I would want to use Mathematica for work related stuff, though.

Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released

#44

Post by jwr »

Mathematica is a great tool. But in my case, there are two huge pain points which limit my use of Mathematica:

1. Horrible REPL experience. Yes, the notebook interface can display graphics, cool. But I would take Emacs with paredit over it any day. After structurally manipulating Clojure code in Emacs with paredit, using the Mathematica interface is like a throwback to the 70s. You mean I need to balance and match my parentheses myself?! Seriously? Debugging larger expressions is like stabbing yourself in the eye with a dull spoon.

2. Badly designed data structures, specifically maps (also known as hashes or associative arrays). This is the most universal data structure, that can be used for almost anything, storing mappings from keys to values. Using maps in Mathematica is awkward and feels like doing precision watchwork in boxing gloves. I don't know why this doesn't get more love, after all if all your data fits in a matrix, Matlab is the competing tool, so better data structures would let Mathematica get a nice competitive advantage.

If these two areas were improved, I would likely subscribe to Mathematica and use it much more.

Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released

#46

Post by daniellerommel »

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…

Stephen is doing a livestream tonight and open for Q&A if anyone wants to see a live tour of v12 features and ask any questions. Twitch: twitch.tv/stephen_wolfram and Youtube on the Wolfram Research channel https://www.youtube.com/user/WolframResearch

Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released

#47

Post by carlob »

phonon wrote: post #35
carlob wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to elaborate? I was one of the developers behind APIFunction and GenerateHTTPResponse. If you are you talking about the ability to deploy a REST API to our cloud I think you are wrong and I'd be happy to show you how.

I don't want to use the Wolfram cloud. I have no interest in tracking number of monthly API calls. Say I wrote a nice notebook that does a bunch of useful things. What's an easy way to deploy it on a server and connect to it with a REST API? It takes me a few minutes to do it with Python using Chalice and AWS Lambda. I'm also not a fan of the primitive URL query syntax. Why isn't there a way to generate an OpenAPI? A…

I absolutely feel your pain. As a matter of fact I've been lobbying internally for a refresh of webMathematica for years. Maybe something is going to come out in the near future. Please hold on :)

Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released

#48

Post by jwr »

phonon wrote: post #32

Still don't understand why they don't have a good JSON REST API story. It's like they have no expectation of Mathematica ever being useful in a server based production environment.

Hmm. I don't know about JSON and REST, but an API would definitely be interesting. In general, I think Wolfram (the company and the man himself) has a very narrow Mathematica-centric view of the world. Every feature begins and ends in the Mathematica notebook interface. That's very limiting.

A good full API would let me use a sane interface (see my other comment about the horrible notebook interface experience with more complex expressions), it would let me use Mathematica in server environments, it would let me make use of Mathematica as a service (which I'd like Wolfram to offer).

Related: I always wished for a Mathematica computational service in the cloud, so that I could offload my larger computations right from the interface. Instead of computing that matrix on my crappy local computer, send everything off to a powerful computer and do it there.

Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released

#49

Post by philipkglass »

carlob wrote: post #30
jordigh wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe your job depends on you defending black boxes, but black boxes have no place in science or mathematics, at least not any black boxes that we create ourselves. That's my point. I shouldn't just tell you "minimise, this function, it worked" (or it didn't, who knows why). We should both be able to see exactly what that minimisation did and why it did or did not work.

I think you misread my comment. I'm agreeing with you on the importance of being able to inspect the code and I'm strongly against black boxes. Where I don't agree with you is that open-source === free and community driven. There are a myriad of hybrid models where a for-profit company releases the code, yet doesn't accept pull requests from the community. The all-or-nothing attitude that you just showed is actually…

Non-free licenses that nonetheless make the source code available to licensees have long been used for scientific software. This licensing model alleviates concerns about black boxes even if it does not align with the FSF's mission.

Is all Mathematica source available to licensees? Is there any additional cost for a source code license? I understand that most companies (and sometimes even research groups) need/want to maintain ownership of their software. I'm ok with that. But I'm opposed to licensing schemes like that of Gaussian, Inc. where a source code license costs more than an all-platforms site license.

Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released

#50

Post by nikofeyn »

layoutIfNeeded wrote: post #34
dimitrov wrote: post #2

I really think that Mathematica and Matlab failed to capitalize on the rise of AI and ML in the last decade. Seems like Python is the only go-to language these fields.

They’re proprietary, so it’s a good thing.

and python is a jumbled mess of versions, package managers, packages, distributions, etc. that isn't a good thing either.
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