81–90 of 191 posts
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I’ve come around on Stephen Wolfram. His puffery essentially hurts nobody besides perhaps those close to him, it’s easy to tune out, while his ambition has produced this really wonderful piece of software.
Hurts no one except the people he sues for working on his ideas faster than him
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…
I'm with you 100% here, but I'm also 100% with sibling jiggawatts.
To me, Mathematica is a computation environment that conveys a Lisp Machine feeling of "the machine and I are working on this problem".
You know, that "assembling things live in the sky" Lisp feeling (Yegge's phrase, not mine).
The only other computation environment that is right there en par in flexibility and conveyance of the same trippy feeling is, of course, Emacs.
The company can still make money from academic and professional licensing and support contracts, and everyone else gets to have access to an awesome thinking tool as a matter of fact.
They've already gone that direction a bit with the Raspberry release, what's left now is just the final push.
So, if Stephen Wolfram ever reads this:
Open source Mathematica and it will have a chance at immortality.
Just like Lisp and just like Emacs, and the people will rejoice.
Disclaimer: I started with Mathematica 4.0 at age 14 (a pirate copy too, sorry!), turned on by that marvellous column in Quantum. But I was put off precisely due to the proprietary nature, and switched to C and Lisp. Consequently I became a CS guy rather than a Physics guy, because C and Lisp were accessible early on, while Mathematica wasn't (legitimately).
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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 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. Have you tried Maxima? It seems more ergonomic.
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It has to be low enough for mass adoption. I’d guess $2/mo or $10/yr. I paid for the $200 license back in high school 10 years ago and it was absolutely amazing; Really ahead of its time and well worth the money. But today as a software engineer the only feature I’m missing in Python is the ability to run natural language expressions in the middle of my code. Besides that, Python is far superior thanks to the communi…
For the record, the question was not about getting "mass adoption" but about the price that would make such a lovely product worth it for a hobbyist. Most hobbys are much more expensive than $10 per year!
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 front-end is just lightyears in front of Jupyter notebooks in just about every conceivable way.
I had the opposite experience, but it's a very broad statement and I suspect we took different interpretations of "front-end"
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By far the most popular programming language in the world is propriatary -- Excel.
Excel is built with programming language and can certainly be used as one, but that doesn't mean it is one. It's also a bit anal to classify Excel as a programming language, most people would say spreadsheets are a tool, where you could write programs, but again, doesn't mean it's a programming language. At most, I'd give you that Excel is a tool that can do "visual programming", but that's far of from being a "progr…
Excel deserves to have the label of programming language even if it shuns that label due to it's target audience.
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…
Could you elaborate on > The front-end is just lightyears in front of Jupyter notebooks in just about every conceivable way. I had the opposite experience, but it's a very broad statement and I suspect we took different interpretations of "front-end"
How does R compare to Mathematica for data science ?
In R, packages are developed by separate authors. Similar functions don't have similar interfaces. There's no unity of style.
In Mathematica, much more careful thought was given to everything, including at a very basic level: names of functions.
Now I'm a big fan of the Tidyverse, and the fact that such a post-hoc language cleanup was possible (and done) is amazing... but the fact that it was necessary [1] is not.
[1] Really not intending flame-bait. This is an opinion that many people disagree with. Perhaps like systemd. It isn't the substance of this comment, it's just the context for my remarks.
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Wasted as in not fulfilling its potential even a little bit. Mathematica is a very niche product. It isn't even very relevant in academia or in engineering. But it could have been if Wolfram hadn't hobbled it with unproductive restrictions. It could have had an audience of millions, and that audience would have brought it more value than a single company is capable of creating through a community. Just look at Python…
Just look at Python indeed. As you say it's a much worse language than many others that were equally available to anyone. And yet somehow it's at the the core of the last 15 years of data science, machine learning and whatnot. If Mathematica had been open-sourced twenty years ago it wouldn't have taken the place of Python. It probably would be even more niche today - and worse.
I've been there during the Python take over and world and it's not my recollection of how it went.
Which are those superior languages that you are talking about?
An important property of Python is that while it may not excel at many things, it's good or decent at everything. Unlike specialized languages like R for example which sucks at everything which is not operations on numbers.