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Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

writings.stephenwolfram.com

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Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#101

Post by Archit3ch »

bborud wrote: post #73
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…

In terms of price: a price point that means a significant portion of my peers will also pay for Mathematica without too much hesitation. The value proposition changes radically when a tool is something "everyone" runs or which everyone can afford to run. But pricing isn't the only problem here. The licensing model would have to be far more permissive. Plus I think any language that hopes to be successful would at lea…

> a price point that means a significant portion of my peers will also pay for Mathematica without too much hesitation

A perpetual license for Office Professional 2021 costs low double digits (depends on locale). They also don't really enforce checks for non-commercial use. As a result, almost every office uses Excel. It still doesn't replace python/C++ for deployment.

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#102

Post by kgwgk »

323 wrote: post #90
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.

> much worse language than many others that were equally available to anyone 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 ever…

Common lisp and a handful of other scheme/lisp variants, for example, if we talk about high-level general purpose languages.

Lush was a lispy open-source language - implemented in C - that deserved a better outcome.

And of course there were other scripting languages around like Perl, Tcl and Lua. Torch was built on top of the latter, by the way.

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#103

Post by qubex »

haberman wrote: post #91

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 M…

1: “Wolfram Language” is the language that is used in Mathematica notebooks, but can also be used on Wolfram Alpha and on the Wolfram Engine.

2: It is usually interpreted but can be compiled. If you RTFA there’s plenty of information about new compiler functions.

3: All expressions in Mathematica have the same form. For example 1+2 is just shorthand for Add[1, 2]. Think of them as M-expressions from LISP (kind of). These can be evaluated or manipulated. Symbolic expressions are not fundamentally different from other types of expressions. Indeed everything is a “symbolic expression”.

4: Wolfram Language/Mathematica goes to great lengths to hide this from you. Indeed again if RTFA you’d have read mentions of this with reference to interfacing with C code.

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#104

Post by kgwgk »

agoose77 wrote: post #95
kgwgk wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

Ok.

If you like Jupyter more than Mathematica as a front-end you can use wolframscript

https://www.wolfram.com/wolframscript/

as a Jupyter kernel:

https://github.com/WolframResearch/WolframLanguageForJupyter

You can use it with the free (for non-production use) Wolfram Engine:

https://www.wolfram.com/engine/

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#105

Post by palisade »

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…

I don't know if it could really be considered to be in the dustbin of history. Wolfram Alpha is actually what powers Siri and other services like it. It is what gives her the intelligence. That is a massive accomplishment.

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#106

Post by rcollyer »

srvmshr wrote: post #2

Just curious: apart from Wolfram language and C++, what is Mathematica built on?

The kernel (WolframEngine) was built with c, and some parts like the image processing functions are built using c++. The front end (notebook interface) is c++ and some objective-c. A lot of core functionality is built using wolfram language that is loaded as needed. Similarly, the paclets (plug-ins) can be built using any language that has a WSTP interface available, but largely this is wolfram language and c++ and occasionally java, but that is being phased out. A lot of the functionality now lives in the paclets as they can be updated/fixed easily.

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#107

Post by bborud »

kgwgk wrote: post #80
bborud wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Whether or not Mathematica is a better language is irrelevant as it doesn't have the properties required a large community contributing value for free. The issue is that other languages which were better and more appropriate for scientific computing _had_ those properties. Or maybe these properties are very specific to python and then an open-source mathematica wouldn't have made a difference either. > And it isn't…

Well, then let's look at some indicators of success.

In terms of adoption Mathematica is even less of a success than if you measure financially. And adoption is a key factor when evaluating whether or not you want to use a programming language for non-trivial projects. It impacts your ability to recruit, access to knowledge (books, forums, evolved practices), usable solutions to common problems (libraries) and even more or less existential questions like whether or not the language will be maintained. Python ticks all of those boxes. Mathematica partially ticks perhaps one of those boxes. And note that this is before we even consider if Python is any good as a language.

If you were to invest in developing a non-trivial system in Mathematica, how enthusiastic do you think investors would be if you nailed your flag to the Mathematica ship? It would not represent good risk management.

Then there's where things are heading. The number of jobs as "data scientist" or "statistician" of some description is growing sharply. It may gain Mathematica a trickle of new users. But the really big gains have been for languages like Python or Julia. Worse still, people tend to move away from software like Mathematica or Matlab, moving to languages like Python and Julia. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if just the growth in Julia alone over the past couple of years is greater than the total paying userbase of Mathematica.

Single digit, or even low double digit growth in a field that has doubled a few times in the same period isn't success. It is everyone else outrunning you. Fast. And I have seen up close and personal how people who find themselves in that situation will rationalize it with "but we're growing".

Is it a success that it is "good"? For some value of good? Well, a lot of people think Lisp is good. And yet after being around for many decades it is still so hard to find developers to maintain Lisp codebases. I've seen about half a dozen major systems written in Lisp being scrapped once one or two key employees leave. Sure, the systems may qualify as good, even great - but that doesn't help when it becomes a business liability? In the real world it doesn't.

I would have loved for Mathematica to succeed. But it hasn't. And I suspect it won't. Even if it were open sourced right now, I seriously doubt it would bear much fruit the first decade or so. If at all, since the big audiences are focused elsewhere.

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#109

Post by the_optimist »

palisade wrote: post #105
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…

I don't know if it could really be considered to be in the dustbin of history. Wolfram Alpha is actually what powers Siri and other services like it. It is what gives her the intelligence. That is a massive accomplishment.

Documentation please. Perhaps SRI originally prototyped on Mathematica, but I do not believe our iPhones are running m scripts in a Mathematica interpreter.

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#110

Post by bborud »

Archit3ch wrote: post #101
bborud wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In terms of price: a price point that means a significant portion of my peers will also pay for Mathematica without too much hesitation. The value proposition changes radically when a tool is something "everyone" runs or which everyone can afford to run. But pricing isn't the only problem here. The licensing model would have to be far more permissive. Plus I think any language that hopes to be successful would at lea…

> a price point that means a significant portion of my peers will also pay for Mathematica without too much hesitation A perpetual license for Office Professional 2021 costs low double digits (depends on locale). They also don't really enforce checks for non-commercial use. As a result, almost every office uses Excel. It still doesn't replace python/C++ for deployment.

> As a result, almost every office uses Excel.

I'll have to disagree with your conclusion.

Excel has been the de facto standard for spreadsheets for a couple of decades so its user base is not because of how the office suite is priced right now, but because it is "what everyone uses".

This effect is even so powerful that despite Apple's suite (whatever it is called this year) being free, and various free online offerings exist that are adequate for a large chunk of users, Microsoft can still price licenses relatively high.

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