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Mathematica Version 12 Released

blog.stephenwolfram.com

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Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released

#51

Post by z2 »

alok-g wrote: post #18
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…

Curiosity as well. At a live presentation I went to a couple of years back, his laptop couldn't connect to my company's projector. The first thing he said was along the lines of, "Fascinating! I've never come across this specific problem before!" Literally every other presenter I've seen facing such an issue would bemoan technology or crack a joke about things 'always' being broken.

Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released

#52

Post by williamstein »

leethargo wrote: post #38
krastanov wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mathics is neat, but it is mostly an interface for a small part of the Sympy library and tries to mimic in a partial ad-hoc way the Mathematica syntax. Mathics also seems to be on life-support in terms of developer activity. Sympy or Sage are much better examples of open source computer algebra systems, but they lack the pattern-matching weirdly-lispy language design of Mathematica (the Wolfram language, which while…

And William Stein (founder of SageMath) just quit his tenured professor position at UW to continue working on CoCalc: http://blog.sagemath.com/2019/04/12/should-i-resign-from-my-...

This morning one of my Ph.D. students (Kevin Lui) said to me, "I may have to implement this [number theory] algorithm for my thesis using Magma, because [some number theory algorithm] is broken in Sage." My visible continued failure to make Sage a viable alternative to commercial closed source math software almost made me cry...

Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released

#53

Post by xvilka »

It is better to focus on Octave, SageMath, SciPy, and Julia instead. Or to donate corresponding projects instead of buying a license of Mathematica. Of course it is an amazing software, but science, especially the core one - mathematics, should be open for everyone.

Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released

#54

Post by layoutIfNeeded »

nikofeyn wrote: post #50
layoutIfNeeded wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which perfectly illustrates how important being free and open source is.

In spite of not having commercial support and versioning shenangians, people still choose Python over the commercial alternatives.

Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released

#55

Post by marmaduke »

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.…

I had a similar gripe: I’ve tried several times the trial versions but 14 days is way too short to get up the learning curve far enough to see whether it’s useable or not. And even then, if I only need it a few hours a week, I couldn’t justify the costs.

Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released

#56

Post by marmaduke »

carlob wrote: post #25
chobytes wrote: post #21

Really excited to try the new SQL interface. The old one was less than pleasant to work with. The Unity stuff is kind of unexpected and I’m curious to try that out too. ...Now I just have to see if my student license lets me upgrade...

> Really excited to try the new SQL interface. The old one was less than pleasant to work with. Cool! I hope people find it useful, that's where most of my past year and a half went :)

Maybe you can’t comment but it was neat (and huge time saver)to see something like sqlalchemy’s reflection.

Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released

#57

Post by thanatropism »

stabbles wrote: post #45
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.

Julia is a great choice as well: https://julialang.org/blog/2018/12/ml-language-compiler

It's a winner-take-it-all situation, though. R is already struggling as a strong second-placer.

What's more: the numerics stack in JavaScript is being modeled after the Python style, so when we're all dragged kicking and screaming to node (UMAP is already implemented in js and that came out when?), those who have cut their teeth on numpy and pandas will be a little less stranded.

Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released

#58

Post by marmaduke »

carlob wrote: post #47
phonon wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

I would second this, there’s no way I can deploy APIs to your cloud and meet compliance requirements for data protection.

Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released

#59

Post by phonon »

carlob wrote: post #47
phonon wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

I was hoping there would be a big API rethink in this area for version 12 :-(

What I don't get, is that long term, making Mathematica useful for actual server based production environments would open up an order of magnitude larger revenue stream. Yet all I see is a fragmented, difficult to use/understand/license environment. There seem to be a dozen, slightly different initiatives, some basically unmaintained.

I mean, what the heck is all this?

https://www.wolfram.com/engine/

I should seamlessly be able to prototype something through the notebook interface, and then deploy it, in a standard generic way, and on a server I control, that can be consumed by anyone who can read through a OpenAPI (with auto generated docs and schemas).

Setting Alpha aside, what you seem to offer is a) a prototyping/notebook environment, like Jupyter (yes, I know you came first) b) a programming language tightly coupled with a really nice stdlib

The programming language itself, realistically, has no use outside your libraries. And there seem to be very little third party Mathematica libraries. The notebook environment is only useful for prototyping.

So the market you should want to grow into, is, "How do we allow people to build something really easily, and then deploy really simply, in their own server/DB environment, with reasonably standard API interfaces?".

The attempts to integrate with Python are a good start, but seem to be more focused on the prototyping aspects.

Something like https://www.django-rest-framework.org/ should be built in.

Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released

#60

Post by chobytes »

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.…

Yeah, I'm a student right now and I've come to really like mathematica... I'll probably even get the hobby license after school, but I don't think I could justify the cost of using it professionally.
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