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Mathematica Version 12 Released

blog.stephenwolfram.com

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Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released

#111

Post by methou »

aloer wrote: post #68
z2 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He actually is interested in this and talks about it in his recent blog post here https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2019/02/seeking-the-producti... Search for EDID > 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.

I got one of these too, for an almost similar reason.

Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released

#112

Post by thomasahle »

thomasahle wrote: post #31

> nowadays the vast majority of what the Wolfram Language (and Mathematica) does isn’t what’s usually considered math I wonder how much of actual Mathematica use is outside of mathematics. The new AsymptoticSum and AsymptoticSolve functions sound useful though!

Seems AsymptoticSum still can't solve many really simple sums though, like

    AsymptoticSum[Binomial[n,k],{k,0,n/3},{n,Infinity,1}]
Will still have to that by hand I guess :(

Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released

#113

Post by jakobegger »

gregschlom wrote: post #74
jakobegger wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

My company isn't going to pay 3500€ for a tool that I don't really need.

Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released

#114

Post by jwr »

jbotz wrote: post #99
jwr wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

I don't think you know what you're talking about. Mathematica is quite big in scope already, but then there's "The Wolfram Language" which is a f !%ing big vision of the world. Take a close look at it some time. Not to mention the audacity of "A New Kind of Science"! Whatever you may rightly accuse Steven Wolfram of, thinking small is not* one of his faults.

Having used Mathematica since 1993 I think I do know what I'm talking about :-)

Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released

#115

Post by jwr »

occamschainsaw wrote: post #82
jwr wrote: post #44

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…

My experience has been the opposite of this. Mathematica/Wolfram lang seems to be a much more functional(as in paradigm) language, because of anonymous/lambda functions and “Tables”. Even loops are discouraged. I use it for math/science stuff and I am delighted every now and then when I figure out how to use mappings in a smart and concise way. My coding style in Python changed quite a bit after learning Mathematica.…

Mathematica borrows a lot of good ideas from many languages and paradigms. But programming languages are a spectrum: whatever you consider "good", there is usually something "better" slightly above it, you just might now know about it yet (the Blub Paradox).

Moving from Clojure to Mathematica/Wolfram is a huge downgrade as far as data structures are concerned. And associations are a particularly big failure.

Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released

#116

Post by 4thaccount »

cjcampbell wrote: post #108
4thaccount wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It wasn't too bad. If you look up the Mathematica GraphTheory primitives for building diagrams it is pretty simple.

To give an example of a diagram showing love interests you create a variable for each person and set is equal to a picture of them.

Then, you simply create a map that represents each of the relationships like Jerry Alice to show that Jerry and Alice like each other, Jerry->Samantha to show Jerry likes Samantha, but it isn't returned and so forth.

At the end, wrap it all in the command to create the diagram (there are lots of them) and you're done.

Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released

#117

Post by kenkangxgwe »

phonon wrote: post #59
carlob wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wolfram Language lacks many open specifications that a usual high-level programming language should expose to their users, such as stdin stream, concurrency, memory model and so on. To some extent, their toolchain and design pattern are behind the state of the art, while the leaders are confident about the design, cf. https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-op.... Hoping they are pushing this great software forward to another 30 years.

Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released

#118

Post by wrthrowaway »

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 am a current employee of Wolfram Research and created an account just to say how very wrong this is. He literally yelled at an ex-employee so hard they went into labor. He is utterly convinced that everyone around him is an idiot, and that one day the world will realize how wrong they were about his ideology and dedicate museums to his honor, etc. He even compared himself to a Greek god in one of his meetings.

He's definitely the kind of person that wouldn't dare scream at someone in real life, but will gladly tell you how much of a PoS you are in the middle of a meeting with a dozen other people.

My fellow employees (except for the hard core brown-nosers) are the most kind and intelligent people I've had the pleasure of working with. They are the true geniuses being this release. SW is the tyrant that the rest of the company is trying to fight.

Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released

#119

Post by copperx »

wrthrowaway wrote: post #118
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 am a current employee of Wolfram Research and created an account just to say how very wrong this is. He literally yelled at an ex-employee so hard they went into labor. He is utterly convinced that everyone around him is an idiot, and that one day the world will realize how wrong they were about his ideology and dedicate museums to his honor, etc. He even compared himself to a Greek god in one of his meetings. He's…

In the livestreams he says things like "this is stupid", or "what the heck is this?", but I have never heard him say "YOU are stupid". Is he acting differently than normal in his livestreams?

Also, one thing that I found a bit troubling is that the employees generally sound terrified, but I've had bosses who were great AND terrifying at the same time, so I have given Wolfram the benefit of the doubt.

> He's definitely the kind of person that wouldn't dare scream at someone in real life.

What do you mean exactly here, given that in the paragraph above you said he screamed at an employee so hard she went into labor?

> He is utterly convinced that everyone around him is an idiot, and that one day the world will realize how wrong they were about his ideology and dedicate museums to his honor, etc.

Is that something that he has said, or is it hyperbole?

Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released

#120

Post by williamstein »

leethargo wrote: post #65
williamstein wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. [1] https://oscar.computeralgebra.de/

I'm very excited about the OSCAR project. It could be very helpful down the road to the overall goal of creating a free open source viable alternative to Mathematics, etc...
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