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Why the Wolfram Language Is (Like) Open Source

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Re: Why the Wolfram Language Is (Like) Open Source

#31

Post by Jeff_Brown »

tombert wrote: post #18
zorked wrote: post #14

Mathematica is really good. If it were Open Source it might have a chance at competing with Jupyter and Python. As it isn't, nobody is going to build businesses around it and the community will be limited. If they are right, it may make Wolfram more money, but it certainly makes Mathematica less successful.

I haven't done a ton with Mathematica, but my understanding is that it allows for more powerful and abstract programming than something like Jupyter. Am I wrong? I would think that Wolfram isn't trying to compete in the data science space, but more in the more abstract academic space.

I used it more than a decade ago, as a grad student. It was magic with symbolic algebra. It was also a solid general purpose language, great for audio and graphics (although probably not realtime).

But the set of libraries for it will never compete with those of an open language.

Re: Why the Wolfram Language Is (Like) Open Source

#32

Post by williamstein »

jimhefferon wrote: post #16
gtirloni wrote: post #8

I'm having a hard time understanding why such posts. You won't change the open source advocate's minds and all others don't care. I guess they value open discussion, which is good.

Perhaps they do, and that is good. I found the editorial from the American Math Society at https://www.ams.org/notices/200710/tx071001279p.pdf to have been a persuasive contribution to that open discussion. (FYI, one author has spent years building SageMath.)

I'm one of the authors that spent years building SageMath; indeed, the goal of our project is to create a viable free open source alternative to Mathematica (etc.).

There's an interesting discussion of actual attempts to create open source implementations of the Wolfram Language in Wikipedia under "Implementations" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfram_Language). The first attempt was 30 years ago by Fateman and he received an official cease-and-desist from Wolfram for his attempts; he did a lot of work on open source Maxima as a result.

I think right now https://mathics.org/ is the most complete open source Wolfram Language implementation, and it uses Sympy extensively under the hood. Mathics was dead for a while when the main author got hired by Wolfram (see https://github.com/mathics/Mathics/graphs/contributors), but during the last year there has been an enormous amount of new work on Mathics.

Re: Why the Wolfram Language Is (Like) Open Source

#33

Post by Banana699 »

tombert wrote: post #18
zorked wrote: post #14

Mathematica is really good. If it were Open Source it might have a chance at competing with Jupyter and Python. As it isn't, nobody is going to build businesses around it and the community will be limited. If they are right, it may make Wolfram more money, but it certainly makes Mathematica less successful.

I haven't done a ton with Mathematica, but my understanding is that it allows for more powerful and abstract programming than something like Jupyter. Am I wrong? I would think that Wolfram isn't trying to compete in the data science space, but more in the more abstract academic space.

They are not really comparable. Jupyter is more like a repl where every cell is a seperate python script that nonetheless share the same interpreter instance and the binding enviroment. The reason it often draws comparisons to Mathematica is that this is the default mode of interaction with Mathematica (on a PC at least), the IDE opens into a text-editor-like interface and any valid mathematica expression can be entered into an input cell and eval'd seperately from the rest of the script, but it permanently mutates the global state of the running interpreter. This is so much the de facto default that a lot of people don't even know how to interact with the language otherwise.

Jupyter creator said (IIRC) that he was in fact inspired by Mathematica's interface, but it's not like Lisp, Smalltalk and APL weren't doing this at least a decade before.

Aside from this superficial similarity, Mathematica the language is a whole different... language. Imperative contructs are awkward to use and frowned upon, symbolic computation over expression trees is the default and very common, loops and with their exit conditons are expressed as either map-reduce style functions or recursive relations with multiple definitions. All code is literally just a tree of symbols that you can inspect and manipulate, you can enter "NonsenseFunction[1,2,3,4,5]+12" and the interpreter would just give it back to you unchanged, the execution model is simply implementing a rule-rewriting engine, if it can't find a rule to simplify an expression it simply returns the thing as is. This is very different from python or really any mainstream language, it's a fun mixture of Lisp and Prolog.

Re: Why the Wolfram Language Is (Like) Open Source

#34

Post by GhettoComputers »

tombert wrote: post #25
GhettoComputers wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Realistically though nobody uses those, and every project like that such as BSD gets used as a base for proprietary software. Do they even support TRIM?

Sure, but that doesn't really take away from my point. I think people are more willing to say that Linux is "open source" because they are allowed to fork it and make their own thing, embodying the spirit of FOSS. It's perfectly valid to criticize the kernel maintainers for including binary blobs, it certainly annoys me, but it's not equivalent to what Wolfram does with Mathematica. ---- I actually used Trisquel for…

Is the ability to fork the essence of what makes a project open source?

Why did you stop using it?

Re: Why the Wolfram Language Is (Like) Open Source

#36

Post by znpy »

TremendousJudge wrote: post #3

Free as in beer, maybe. Not free as in speech. I cannot fork the language and use it however I please. Maybe Stephen Wolfram has the best intentions, but he won't live forever. What then? What are the guarantees that Oracle won't buy it and screw over the users?

> Free as in beer, maybe. Not free as in speech.

That is true, but the choice of words is correct: Open Source software is not necessarily Free Software.

Re: Why the Wolfram Language Is (Like) Open Source

#37

Post by headhasthoughts »

tombert wrote: post #23
Banana699 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wolfram's arrogance is really a kind of meme at this point, a new kind of meme if you will.

I find it kind of weird. Didn't Wolfram get a doctorate at like age 19? And have a successful company pretty shortly afterwards? Why does he act so insecure and feel the need to brag about himself all the time...what could he possibly even be insecure about?

Why do you need to be insecure to brag?

If you're awesome, and you're aware of the fact, which you presumably are if you're genuinely as intelligent as you think you are, why not have fun with it?

I'm not in the camp that thinks Wolfram deserves his success, but if I did think he did, I'd celebrate his bragging.

As it is, though, I find the Wolfram's Wolfram Wolfram less than appealing.

Re: Why the Wolfram Language Is (Like) Open Source

#38

Post by daly »

The current average company lifespan is 21 years (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1259275/average-company-...). It has slowly decreased over time.

Given that Wolfram Research is tightly held, what happens when the company ends? Does it "punch a hole" in computational mathematics? Does all of your code stop working?

This isn't idle speculation. I used to use a Symbolics machine. Symbolics Inc. failed. The Symbolics software still exists but you can only buy a copy that runs on DOS. I used Common Lisp on Symbolics. Common Lisp is a standard. There are open source implementations so all of my code survived.

Will your code survive when Wolfram Research dies?

(Full Disclosure, I'm the lead developer on open source Axiom)

Re: Why the Wolfram Language Is (Like) Open Source

#39

Post by headhasthoughts »

GhettoComputers wrote: post #24
tombert wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of distros of Linux that have fully removed binary blobs [1]. As far as I am aware, it wouldn't be allowed to fork Mathematica and remove all proprietary blobs. [1] https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.en.html

Realistically though nobody uses those, and every project like that such as BSD gets used as a base for proprietary software. Do they even support TRIM?

Debian's default distribution has no binary blobs, and every BSD's problem is its terrible license.

Re: Why the Wolfram Language Is (Like) Open Source

#40

Post by tombert »

GhettoComputers wrote: post #34
tombert wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but that doesn't really take away from my point. I think people are more willing to say that Linux is "open source" because they are allowed to fork it and make their own thing, embodying the spirit of FOSS. It's perfectly valid to criticize the kernel maintainers for including binary blobs, it certainly annoys me, but it's not equivalent to what Wolfram does with Mathematica. ---- I actually used Trisquel for…

Is the ability to fork the essence of what makes a project open source? Why did you stop using it?

> Is the ability to fork the essence of what makes a project open source?

Kind of? The ability to "do whatever you want" with the code more or less embodies the experience of FOSS.

> Why did you stop using it?

I got a job at Apple, and roughly three months after I started there that laptop broke and I got a discount on a Macbook. I know I could put Linux on there, and maybe at some point I will, but currently my school requires that we either have a Windows or Mac computer, and since I don't want to go about mucking with virtual machines, I'm sticking with macOS.

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