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.
My school is for some reason still renewing my student license 7 years after graduating, so if they're that lax everywhere you might not have to worry. :P
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…
There can be no compromise: we are small, independent and have very little income. You are part of a large company with hundreds of employees and millions of revenue. All we have is software freedom; if we compromise on that, we have nothing left.
Also, I didn't say that producing free software meant you had to accept patches from anyone or listen to anything they said. All it means is that you no longer forbid your clients from knowing how your code works and you no longer forbid your clients from sharing that knowledge and that software with each other. You don't have to offer extra support or open up a public bug tracker. You don't even have to offer access to your repos; giving your clients the tarballs would be enough.
The GPL isn't anti-commercial, but your job is structured to make you believe it is. It's possible to make a living without forbidding your clients from learning and sharing.
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.
The thing is, looking at that list... most of it actually seems reasonable to me. Quality software costs money, and that money comes from somewhere. The problem is network effects. The blog post is right that if you are running a large deployment of things like R or Python, you are likely paying vendors and getting support contracts and all these things so that it's not really free-as-in-beer to you. But there are a…
Some of that list looks reasonable to me (mainly what you pointed out, that software development costs money), but there's a heaping dose of old-Microsoft-style FUD about open-source ("Because open-source projects are directed by their contributors, there is a risk of hijacking by interest groups whose view of the future is not aligned with yours") mixed in there too. The core argument, though, seems to be that the Wolfram Language is a special case and could never be built in any other way because it would be too hard. I don't buy it. Everyone thinks their own thing is a special case, and it rarely is. Contrary to his argument, the core language doesn't really need to be informed by subject matter expertise in graph algorithms or machine learning or whatever. They're really just libraries, no matter what he says. And it doesn't really require that extraordinary a leap to have some core types like points and intervals and curves that are shared across the system, without fragmenting. His arguments are just not that convincing to me.
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.…
btw it seems the develop open cloud thing is mostly free, which might do it for some cases,
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...
How do you feel about the OSCAR [1] project? It is similar to Sage in its mission, although smaller in scope, I guess. And it looks like they were able to secure significant funding (at least for the duration of the project).
Not sure what else is different, besides using Julia as the glue language, rather than Python/Cython.
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...
For what is worth, even if it is not perfected yet, SAGE is nonetheless already an amazing achievement that has helped me in my studies.
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...
For what is worth, even if it is not perfected yet, SAGE is nonetheless already an amazing achievement that has helped me in my studies.
I can second that :-)
It empowered me to do casual Gröbner basis computations without learning a new tool/language (Singular).
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.
> for high-profile, high-production-value events, I have a little box that spoofs EDID strings to force my computer to send a specific signal, regardless of what the projector seems to be asking it for.
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…
I think you may not be the target market. A lower-level option is often more powerful, but carries added complexity and a steeper learning curve. It is my understanding that Mathematica is more valued in academic settings where not everyone wants to deal with learning Clojure.
Many poor people rent furniture rather than buying because it's not feasible to muster the initial investment, and must continue doing it in spite of the long-term loss. The same is true here: not everyone uses Clojure over Mathematica because many cannot find the large chunk of time to learn it, though its use may produce a net gain of time long-term.
> Using maps in Mathematica is awkward and feels like doing precision watchwork in boxing gloves.
Can you elaborate a bit more on this? I haven't used it before.
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.
I mean, since Wolfram is a valuable company it's clear plenty of people choose commercial software over their free alternatives