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Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

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Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#91

Post by haberman »

Can anyone offer a concrete summary of what Wolfram Language and Mathematica are, from a technical perspective? The marketing material alone makes it difficult for me to situate them in the landscape of languages.

- Is "Wolfram Language" the language used in Mathematica notebooks? Or is Mathematica a separate language, implemented using Wolfram Language? What does Mathematica add to Wolfram Language?

- I assume the Mathematica language is interpreted (not compiled) so it can be used in interactive notebooks. Any info about what its interpreter is like? I'm guessing it is compiled to byte code prior to being interpreted?

- How are symbolic expressions represented? Are symbolic expressions a distinct data type? Can you write a function that takes a symbolic expression and computes the derivative (I'm sure such a function is built in, but does the language let you implement a thing like this yourself?)

- Is there any kind of static typing, or is everything dynamically typed?

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#92

Post by easrng »

jiggawatts wrote: post #79
kgwgk wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. [...] There is no reason to believe this will change. The hobbyist license is less than $200 per year. What kind of pricing would make it practical for you? [Edit: The student license (non-expiring) was $139 twenty years ag…

Once in a blue moon I use Mathematica as an overpowered calculator. I keep it around partly for nostalgia, and partly because it makes me feel like a true computer scientist . Every time I use it, I have this mental image of using a 500 ton press to crack a walnut. It's ludicrous overkill, but it brings a certain satisfaction to be able to use arbitrary precision maths when I don't need to, and use nonlinear fits for…

It's free for personal use on Raspberry Pis btw, and also there's some kind of free tier for Wolfram Cloud.

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#93

Post by 323 »

bborud wrote: post #68
kgwgk wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Python ended up at the core of data science because it was capable of serving a community. A community that produced comprehensive computational libraries, which, combined with the low threshold for getting started, made it more accessible for an audience that is interested in computation first and programming second. This is largely the same audience as for tools like Matlab and Mathematica. And to serve that market…

> We can't know if Mathematica could have taken the place of Python if it was open sourced,

I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have, not with it's current lispy syntax. There is ton of empirical evidence that overt functional style is unnatural for the human mind, especially beginners. Which is why there is no large scale use of any such language.

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#94

Post by pjmlp »

catchclose8919 wrote: post #70
kgwgk wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It probably would be even more niche today - and worse. Maybe, but a better successor would've evolved out of it. Matlab had Octave as an open source alternative. Not used much, but it inspired the creation of Julia. Based on how fast it's evolving Julia will be the superpowered-grandson-of-Matlab :) The Mathematica/Wolfram bloodline will unfortunately die off at some point... lots of ideas will be lost and time wi…

Forgetting that Java tool vendors are ex-Smalltalkers?

Including the JIT and GC that powers OpenJDK, which was only made freely available on Java 6 version.

Also that Sun went bankrupt trying to push Java everywhere, while the other Java vendors (and Microsoft with .NET Core), learned to only open the core part, while the crown jewels are kept commercial.

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#95

Post by agoose77 »

kgwgk wrote: post #88
agoose77 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

Under what interpretation of "front-end" would Mathematica's front-end be behind of Jupyter notebooks?

Hah, answering a question with a question ;)

A few pain points for me:

- No Markdown support. Yes, there's rich input, but I find it more natural to write prose in a markup language rather than with a rich editor.

- Single "kernel" support. This isn't a criticism of Mathematica per-se: it doesn't care about other languages. But, it's nice to be able to use Jupyter Notebooks with C++, Python, etc.

- Limited UX w.r.t layout. JupyterLab lets me pin outputs, split the view, run a terminal alongside my notebook etc.

- Restricted ecosystem. This is a big one - it's not trivial to write an extension for Mathematica to extend its UX / rich output mechanism. With Jupyter, this is fairly trivial.

Don't get me wrong, they're different tools, and that's why I'm reluctant to engage with "X is better than Y" discussions. Mathematica is vastly unsuited to the kind of analysis / work that I do, whilst I'm sure the same is true of those who swear by Mathematica.

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#96

Post by pjmlp »

catchclose8919 wrote: post #72
tableofzero wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By far the most popular programming language in the world is propriatary -- Excel.

There's many open-source alternatives to Excel. Rarely used, but it settles any fear of lock in. This also made the area palatable for other commercial competitors to enter the space - Google-sheets drive A TON of enterprise org work nowadays. You could say that open-source alternatives immensely popularized spreadsheets and resulted in the very nice ecosystem we have now. Sure, heave finance user stick to MS Excell…

Since when is Google sheets not proprietary?

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#97

Post by analog31 »

dhdc wrote: post #30
catchclose8919 wrote: post #26

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.

I've been involved in some hires of new graduates in both engineering and physics. What I've noticed is that students are acutely aware of job market for programmers, and to a somewhat lesser extent, the relative status of "hardware" and "software." They're differentiating themselves into programmers and non-programmers. I've observed that anybody who can program well enough to do it for money, will eventually be doing so.

They're all exposed to Matlab (it's on every resume), but that could range from actually knowing how to program, to having been given some pre-written scripts to run in a class.

However, the ones who are inclined to program, want to learn a language that they perceive to be relevant to the software development job market. Some of them have gone so far as to take a handful of CS courses and are as up to date on good coding practices as the CS majors themselves. This even includes some students in traditionally non programming fields such as biology and chemistry.

Remember that it's usually easier to learn your second language, so if a student has the itch to program, there's a pretty good chance that they will have learned Python on the side by the time they graduate.

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#98

Post by pjmlp »

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…

Given that Fortran is one of the few languages with first class support for GPGPU development, including graphical debuggers and IDEs, not bad.

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#99

Post by catchclose8919 »

forgotpwd16 wrote: post #60
catchclose8919 wrote: post #26

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…

>as legacy as Fortran is now Disappointingly because modern Fortran is a nice language for numerical computing.

Compared to C, sure it is. Probably compared to C++ to since it's less opportunity for obsfucation. Compared to anything else probably not.

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#100

Post by danuker »

jiggawatts wrote: post #79
kgwgk wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. [...] There is no reason to believe this will change. The hobbyist license is less than $200 per year. What kind of pricing would make it practical for you? [Edit: The student license (non-expiring) was $139 twenty years ag…

Once in a blue moon I use Mathematica as an overpowered calculator. I keep it around partly for nostalgia, and partly because it makes me feel like a true computer scientist . Every time I use it, I have this mental image of using a 500 ton press to crack a walnut. It's ludicrous overkill, but it brings a certain satisfaction to be able to use arbitrary precision maths when I don't need to, and use nonlinear fits for…

> no-free option

Perhaps Wolfram Alpha is a "free option" for the once-in-a-blue-moon use case.

But you might lose any work at any moment, if Wolfram decides to turn it off.

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