Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica • Hacker News Board

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#41

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 8:10 AM UTC

jiggawatts wrote: post #8

n-e-w wrote: post #6

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…

Java and C# are partially open source, some of the best tools that make them shine are commercial.

Real time bare metal implementations, GUI tooling, 3rd party GUI components ecosystem, data analysis of runtimes in productions without code changes, architecture modeling tools on the IDEs,...

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#42

Post by dguest » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 8:10 AM UTC

sveme wrote: post #35

jiggawatts wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's the perspective of a software developer. Neither Mathematica nor Matlab actually try to address this market. Both are languages for mathematicians, scientists and engineers and are still mostly unrivalled when it comes to domain knowledge. Python has the domain knowledge in the datascience domain, Julia has pretty good domain knowledge in OR. No one really comes close to capturing the symbolic computation doma…

Targeting the non-engineering crowd also means they are optimizing for a group that cares less about stability. That allows them to deprecate features, change interfaces, etc. An open source language is inevitably going to attract some maintainers who care about (or are paid to care about) keeping legacy code working.

I haven't worked with Mathematica in years, though, so this is mostly speculation: how strictly do they maintain backward compatibility?

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#43

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 8:14 AM UTC

catchclose8919 wrote: post #25

...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…

That is why some enjoy state of the art JIT/AOT compilers and GC implementations, whereas others make do with what they have.

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#44

Post by Smaug123 » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 8:14 AM UTC

dguest wrote: post #42

sveme wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the perspective of a software developer. Neither Mathematica nor Matlab actually try to address this market. Both are languages for mathematicians, scientists and engineers and are still mostly unrivalled when it comes to domain knowledge. Python has the domain knowledge in the datascience domain, Julia has pretty good domain knowledge in OR. No one really comes close to capturing the symbolic computation doma…

Targeting the non-engineering crowd also means they are optimizing for a group that cares less about stability. That allows them to deprecate features, change interfaces, etc. An open source language is inevitably going to attract some maintainers who care about (or are paid to care about) keeping legacy code working. I haven't worked with Mathematica in years, though, so this is mostly speculation: how strictly do t…

Extremely strictly. They're fond of saying that most programs from v1 will Just Work in version 13. See https://reference.wolfram.com/language/tutorial/Incompatible... for a list of breaking changes. They even document certain bugfixes this way:

> AbsoluteOptions has been reimplemented to be more accurate, and the form returned for a particular option may be different now.

They deprecate stuff, but almost never remove it:

> ValueQ has been redesigned to test for the presence of a definition regardless of whether the definition is used. Old behavior can be restored by specifying "Legacy" as the method.

They play more fast-and-loose with functions documented as "experimental".

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#45

Post by discordance » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 8:15 AM UTC

jiggawatts wrote: post #8

n-e-w wrote: post #6

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…

Mathematica set the standard for Notebooks (as seen in iPython, Jupyter, Sage etc).

If their influence on that is their only contribution to the world, which it is not, then they have made their mark.

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#46

Post by enriquto » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 8:31 AM UTC

catchclose8919 wrote: post #26

dhdc wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> as legacy as Fortran is now

what are you talking about? There's a lot of numerical code written (and actively developed) in Fortran today. If you are anywhere near numerical mathematics, you are running algorithms written in Fortran that somebody is maintaining.

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#47

Post by bborud » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 8:33 AM UTC

jiggawatts wrote: post #8

n-e-w wrote: post #6

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…

The first time I encountered Mathematica was 30 years ago, and I genuinely thought that within a decade this would be a tool that everyone would learn in college. A few years later, when working at the university I was a bit puzzled to find that while you could find things like Matlab on the various computer labs around campus (usually running some flavor of Unix), Mathematica was nowhere to be seen. Not even on the Windows labs.

The guy who was in charge of negotiating software licenses for the university said that it was a chicken and egg problem. Mathematica wasn't very available because it was expensive, Wolfram wasn't easy to negotiate with.

With people not learning Mathematica there never developed a demand for it - and because you couldn't expect to get your hands on a license it wasn't worth the investment both in time and money to learn mathematica, or worse yet, to make yourself dependent on it for getting work done.

Mathematica has always been a lovely product. But it has also always been impractical due to its pricing and restrictions. Whether you are in academia, a working professional or just a hobbyist. Which has made it a very niche piece of software. For 30+ years.

There is no reason to believe this will change. And that's fine. It is their software and they can do whatever they want with it. But it also means it is largely irrelevant software for most people, including the scientific community. That isn't a disparaging remark, it is an accurate representation of reality.

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#48

Post by lokedhs » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 8:33 AM UTC

throwaway81523 wrote: post #31

logicchains wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried Maxima as a symbolic equation solver?

Or Sage (sagemath.org)?

Sage uses Maxima though. And a bunch of other things as well.

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#49

Post by tableofzero » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 8:39 AM UTC

jiggawatts wrote: post #8

n-e-w wrote: post #6

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…

> There is no other use for Wolfram Language scripts outside of Mathematica, which comes with a "license server". That's... a dead end.

Yes. They call it Wolfram Engine

>Can I publish Wolfram code in Docker Hub and expect it to work (legally)? No.

Yes, they call it Wolfram Application Server (does require a license)

>Can I throw some Wolfram code into an Azure Function and have it compute something for me on demand? Nope.

Yes: https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/RemoteBatchSubmit...

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#50

Post by bborud » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 8:40 AM UTC

sveme wrote: post #35

jiggawatts wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's the perspective of a software developer. Neither Mathematica nor Matlab actually try to address this market. Both are languages for mathematicians, scientists and engineers and are still mostly unrivalled when it comes to domain knowledge. Python has the domain knowledge in the datascience domain, Julia has pretty good domain knowledge in OR. No one really comes close to capturing the symbolic computation doma…

I wouldn't lump Mathematica and Matlab together. Not least because Matlab is almost ubiquitous in academia and in engineering while Mathematica is extremely rare.