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

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#121

Post by iancmceachern » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 2:56 PM 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…

As I understand, Matlab and it'd kernal ate also closed, it's used everywhere.

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#122

Post by AlanYx » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 2:56 PM UTC

MonkeyClub wrote: post #83

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…

> I love Wolfram stuff. 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 th…

>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.

Agreed. That's the main thing that tends to get lost when people make comparisons between MATLAB and Mathematica. Mathematica is conceptually elegant and often just a joy to work with as an intellectual tool. Its core problem is just that it isn't more widely available. MATLAB on the other hand is just an inelegant, obvious implementation of a numerical environment. Its strength is just the variety of toolkits you can license, but once your domains get equivalent open source toolkits, there's no reason not to bail on MATLAB.

>I started with Mathematica 4.0 at age 14 (a pirate copy too, sorry!)

The nice thing these days is that the full version of Mathematica is available for free on the Raspberry Pi. Wolfram deserves some kudos for that.

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#123

Post by chobytes » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 3:01 PM 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…

I can assure you its widely used by certain fields in academia. Im currently a research assistant in physics at a large lab, and mathematica is ubiquitous.

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#124

Post by Qem » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 3:02 PM UTC

MonkeyClub wrote: post #83

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…

> I love Wolfram stuff. 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 th…

> 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.

Do you know Pharo? The experience you describe is also typical in the Smalltalk family. See https://pharo.org/

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#125

Post by Qem » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 3:10 PM UTC

mhh__ wrote: post #82

sundarurfriend wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any examples?

He sued Matthew Cook to stop him publishing a proof of a conjecture Wolfram made about 110

After this fiasco, I wonder how many of Stephen Wolfram's claimed results are just his employees ideas with true author names filled off.

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#126

Post by chobytes » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 3:10 PM UTC

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…

The wolfram language is kind of irrelevant. I dont think anyone outside of HN and programming language people care about it or how its done.

Mathematica is the star of the show. Its a large collection of specialty libraries and tools, with (mostly) very nice documentation, that all interoperate together well.

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#127

Post by Archit3ch » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 3:13 PM UTC

tableofzero wrote: post #49

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…

> 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?…

My Raspberry Pi 3 came with Mathematica. If I write Mathematica code on it, put the device in a box and sell it, I just violated the license agreement.

Contrast with gcc.

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#128

Post by BeetleB » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 3:34 PM 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…

> Python, Julia, and Jupyter notebooks will simply wipe out all usage of Mathematica outside of a few esoteric fields.

I'd wager that most of Mathematica's usage today, and in the past has been for those esoteric fields.

MATLAB always had higher market share for numerical work.

Mathematica's strength is in pure math. And nothing out there comes even close - not even SageMath. I wouldn't be surprised if all the pure math open source developers who are also math experts out there are fewer in number than those who contribute to Mathematica. You need detailed expertise in a math discipline. William Stein - founder of SageMath, wrote once on how impossibly difficult it is to get grants to support SageMath - most of them go to Mathematica or MATLAB. So if a math faculty member wants the extra income from grants, he/she is going to write a proposal targeting Mathematica, not SageMath.

Of course, once Stephen Wolfram dies, I don't know if Mathematica will continue to survive. But as long as he's alive, no open source pure math SW will overtake it.

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#129

Post by BeetleB » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 3:38 PM 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…

> In 20 years Matlab will be as legacy as Fortran is now, still some left but mostly forgone.

This is a joke, right?

In many academic disciplines that involve numerical work, the amount of Fortran code in use today greatly exceeds that of any of the rivals.

Professors were forced to use Fortran by their advisors when they were in school, so most of their code is in it. These professors are not going to allow their students to reinvent any wheels. And the cycle continues. To give you an idea of how extreme this phenomenon is - almost all the Fortran code out there in academia is still in Fortran 77.

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#130

Post by forgotpwd16 » Thu, Jun 30, 2022, 3:39 PM UTC

catchclose8919 wrote: post #99

forgotpwd16 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Issue is most such codes are written in C and C++. Also anything else usually lacks native multidimensional arrays, element-wise array operations, and parallel programming facilities, let alone raw performance.