31–40 of 191 posts
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I agree wholeheartedly with this. In fact, if Mathematica were open source, I feel it may even encroach upon machine learning applications. Since finishing up in university, I have sorely missed my free access to a fast and ergonomic symbolic equation solver. Sympy is an unsatisfactory substitute.
Have you tried Maxima as a symbolic equation solver?
...open-source when? There's basically zero widely used programming languages that are not open-source, get to grips with this ffs. Esp. since Wolfram strives to be somewhat-general-purpose in a way (it's not smth like eg. K who's niche anyway) and having an open-source version is crucial in this segment. Hire some ppl (sales, mgmt, product etc.) who know how to make money from open-source (get some from RedHat, IBM…
Wasted as in providing a continuously improved product to the thousands of paying customers that fund this effort?
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Counter example: MATLAB. Proprietory software, proprietory language, yet it remains unrivalled in control engineering, DSP, communication systems and so on. I genuinely hope that Octave can take off and trade blows with MATLAB face to face, but not sure if that will ever happen simply because of the amount of money MathWorks is pumping into developing toolboxes.
> yet it remains unrivalled in control engineering No, its usage is just declining slower in those areas because ppl don't want unnecessary change introducing unnecessary defects, esp since safety and reliability matters a lot for some equipments, and also engineers spend time on smth else than learning new languages and frameworks. In 20 years Matlab will be as legacy as Fortran is now, still some left but mostly fo…
At least in the United States, there’s nothing to stop someone from independently implementing the Wolfram Language and libraries and not paying Wolfram anything. See Oracle v. Google (U.S. 2021), which held that copyright law does not protect libraries (e.g. structure, function names, semantics) and APIs because they’re necessary for compatibility/interoperability. The highest court said that was fair use for Google…
> which held that copyright law does not protect libraries Correct me if I’m wrong but it held that this specific case was fair use, not that structure, function name, etc are not copyrightable. While it does give a huge precedent case, code in itself is still under copyright by default. But IANAL.
Rather than just bashing Stephen's personality and rehashing Cosma Shalizi's driveby on NKOS, can we try and focus on the technical accomplishment that Mathematica represents? It really is an astounding system. If you enjoy functional programming, the language is super expressive and productive. The integrated libraries are fantastic -- especially if you want to chain together different knowledge domains through a co…
The saddest thing about Mathematica is that despite the incredible level of effort invested into it by some of the smartest people on the planet, it will inevitably be relegated to the dustbin of history. As a proprietary language and kernel, it can never compete long-term with open source alternatives. It's one thing to have a proprietary product , but for decades now proprietary languages have been a no-go for prac…
Rather than just bashing Stephen's personality and rehashing Cosma Shalizi's driveby on NKOS, can we try and focus on the technical accomplishment that Mathematica represents? It really is an astounding system. If you enjoy functional programming, the language is super expressive and productive. The integrated libraries are fantastic -- especially if you want to chain together different knowledge domains through a co…
And no, "just run pip ..." will not work - who worked on these facilities probably knows how some of the smartest people in the world could be extremely dumb with the tech stuff.
Regarding Wolfram Language, at the beginning (when it was just a "Mathematica"), I hated it as I came from the C/C++ world. But after I embraced lisp et al., I found Wolfram Language very expressive and easier to grasp than before. Moreover, if I'm not mistaken, Wolfram Language is the only widespread implementation of M-expressions [1], the original form of LISP how John McCarthy wanted it to look.
> The front-end is just lightyears in front of Jupyter notebooks in just about every conceivable way.
Absolutely :)
At least in the United States, there’s nothing to stop someone from independently implementing the Wolfram Language and libraries and not paying Wolfram anything. See Oracle v. Google (U.S. 2021), which held that copyright law does not protect libraries (e.g. structure, function names, semantics) and APIs because they’re necessary for compatibility/interoperability. The highest court said that was fair use for Google…
Unfortunately I don't think this will happen: The Wolfram Language has a _huge_ library of functions from various domains, which is where most of its strength comes from. If you had the time and money to reimplement all of them, you could just make a competing product with better API. I don't think there is enough commercial interest in running existing Wolfram Language code without Mathematica.
Also nitpick but you can run Wolfram code without Mathematica directly using the Wolfram Engine.
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ran into this myself just today, but with Symbolics.jl instead of SymPy. I just needed an algebra scratchpad, and Symbolics was.. barren. and uninviting. I thought of reaching for Mathematica but resorted to pencil and paper, like a barbarian. same deal with solvers more generally. the coin-or stuff (e.g. Cbc) is slow and buggy, Cplex and Gurobi are far better but very expensive. where are the PhDs in this field? wha…
> I thought of reaching for Mathematica but resorted to pencil and paper, like a barbarian. A very computer-science perspective with the obligatory dose of hubris. Pencil and paper is continuing to serve a much older, much more consolidated discipline (mathematics) well for... ever since paper was invented.
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The saddest thing about Mathematica is that despite the incredible level of effort invested into it by some of the smartest people on the planet, it will inevitably be relegated to the dustbin of history. As a proprietary language and kernel, it can never compete long-term with open source alternatives. It's one thing to have a proprietary product , but for decades now proprietary languages have been a no-go for prac…
I agree wholeheartedly with this. In fact, if Mathematica were open source, I feel it may even encroach upon machine learning applications. Since finishing up in university, I have sorely missed my free access to a fast and ergonomic symbolic equation solver. Sympy is an unsatisfactory substitute.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> yet it remains unrivalled in control engineering No, its usage is just declining slower in those areas because ppl don't want unnecessary change introducing unnecessary defects, esp since safety and reliability matters a lot for some equipments, and also engineers spend time on smth else than learning new languages and frameworks. In 20 years Matlab will be as legacy as Fortran is now, still some left but mostly fo…
> In 20 years Matlab will be as legacy as Fortran is now Not if MathWorks keep offering discounts to universities for putting MATLAB in the courses, gotta get those undergrads "hooked" early before graduating.
After raising their voices, Faculty finally switched from Matlab to Python for those courses because what matters was your number of hire after their master not to get a deal for a software nobody uses besides two old professors.
And in general, the more academia moves away from private solutions (be it STATA, ArcGIS, Matlab, SAS, etc), education will move from it also. (Belgian University)