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…
Associations came very late to Mathematica (version 10 if I remember right) and the whole of the tools in Mathematica had to be converted over. The result was incomplete.
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/
Since a full version Mathematica is available on the Raspberry Pi, anyone who is interested has a very inexpensive route to getting a free copy. Mathematica is very functional on the Raspberry Pi and, I think, making the software available as such is very generous of Wolfram. Also for those who cant afford a Raspberry Pi, excellent mathematical functionality is available via the Wolfram Alpha website for free.
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 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 :)
A shrink-wrapped version of the instant API that could be installed on a server would be a good product.
There's always Mathematica for the Raspberry Pi, completely free for personal use! https://www.wolfram.com/raspberry-pi/
Since a full version Mathematica is available on the Raspberry Pi, anyone who is interested has a very inexpensive route to getting a free copy. Mathematica is very functional on the Raspberry Pi and, I think, making the software available as such is very generous of Wolfram. Also for those who cant afford a Raspberry Pi, excellent mathematical functionality is available via the Wolfram Alpha website for free.
> those who cant afford a Raspberry Pi
That is very few people who would use Mathematica, no?
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 mea…
Mathematica is not tied to the notebook interface. The notebook is the most interactive way to use it, but you can save code in standard files and run it through the engine. You had always the option to call this code from C, but now they are adding Python bindings too. So, in my opinion, the only thing that limits Mathematica to be used for web services is licensing. I think they know this and probably it is the reason why they don't spend too much effort trying to sell this use case.
I would want to use Mathematica for work related stuff, though.
Well then maybe your company can afford it, no? (Unless you're a bootstrapping startup, of course)
I suspect many people are in the same position I am. I like the tool and occasionally wish I had a copy at work, but the problems I would use it on are infrequent and/or peripheral to my actual job. It's hard to justify burning the social capital for an 'occasional' nicety.
Have you looked at Octave? https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/
Octave and Scilab are more Matlab like replacements as a user below commented. Sure both are for mathematical code, but Octave is more for numerical work and Mathematica for Symbolic computation. However, Mathematica is powerful in a much bigger way than Octave. Mathematica is more like a very successful and commercial lisp in that it has zillions of composable and we'll documented functions for everything. You don't…
I’d love to see a write up of how you handled that network diagram scenario. It’s been years since I used Mathematica, and my main use was exploring cryptography and cryptanalysis. That need isn’t there for me these days, but I might jump back in if I had a sense of how to use it to handle general purpose diagramming tasks.
There's always Mathematica for the Raspberry Pi, completely free for personal use! https://www.wolfram.com/raspberry-pi/
Since a full version Mathematica is available on the Raspberry Pi, anyone who is interested has a very inexpensive route to getting a free copy. Mathematica is very functional on the Raspberry Pi and, I think, making the software available as such is very generous of Wolfram. Also for those who cant afford a Raspberry Pi, excellent mathematical functionality is available via the Wolfram Alpha website for free.
>excellent mathematical functionality is available via the Wolfram Alpha website for free.
My experience is that they've significantly ratcheted down the amount of compute time per request in recent years. It's become much less useful to me because so many of my requests time out.
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?