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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

#131

Post by ziotom78 »

NavinF wrote: post #66
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…

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…

I agree. I am still using Mathematica 5 for Students, which I purchased when I was a student. Despite the fact that at the time I bought the version for Windows, it is worki g like a charm on my Linux laptop thanks to Wine.

Nowadays my daily workflow is mainly based on Python and Julia, I use Mathematica just for symbolic calculations (solving differentialequations, computing integrals...)

P.S. Once I had the chance to use Mathematica 12 on a server in my University, but I found that it offered nothing that I could need that wasn't already in version 5...

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#132

Post by ModernMech »

nborwankar wrote: post #115

I think it’s fair to say that the documentation system of Mathematica is the best documentation for any software language anywhere in the world at any time. Not exaggerating one bit. There are not only practical example snippets for every language function but also tutorials and technical deep dives on related topic areas such as signal processing, video analysis, partial differential equations such as the heat equat…

How would you stack Matlab against Mathematica? I’ve always found Matlab’s docs share a lot of the same qualities as your see in Mathematica.

Interesting that both are commercial languages.

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#133

Post by palisade »

the_optimist wrote: post #109
palisade wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Rather than return a list of Google search results, Siri uses Wolfram Alpha to generate what it believes is the correct answer."

https://www.siriuserguide.com/what-is-wolfram-alpha/ https://www.siriuserguide.com/how-to-use-siri-knowledge/

"Siri Knowledge uses a combination of web searches, inbuilt apps, and Wolfram Alpha to find the answers to a fantastic variety of questions."

If you ask Wolfram Alpha for more information about Siri: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Siri

It returns:

"Siri is a personal assistant application for iOS. The application was first available from the App Store, then came standard on Apple's mobile devices starting with iPhone 4S. Siri uses natural language processing to answer questions and perform actions by delegating requests to an expanding set of web services, including Wolfram|Alpha."

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#134

Post by laichzeit0 »

wiz21c wrote: post #10

How does R compare to Mathematica for data science ?

R is great if all you do involves working in RStudio and that is where it stops. The R runtime is painful to scale. You’re not going to do anything like FastAPI + scikit learn model serving. All the tooling is years behind what’s available in the Python ecosystem. I can’t speak for RStudio and their commercial offering since I’ve never used it, nor want to be locked into some vendor like that.

I’m going to be honest, even RStudio sucks compared to PyCharm. Like really sucks. I almost believe people who love RStudio have never used a better IDE or don’t have serious software development backgrounds to know that it sucks.

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#135

Post by jhgb »

AlanYx wrote: post #122
MonkeyClub wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Wolfram deserves some kudos for that.

I feel like the other drug dealers in history might be offended at not getting at least some credit here for inventing this method.

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#136

Post by buescher »

dig1 wrote: post #36
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 will second this. Wolfram (Stephen and company) marketing isn't spot on, but I'm yet going to find a system like Mathematica. People on HN forget that most of the places where Mathematica is intended to (R&D, math/physics departments, research facilities etc.) don't have tech people willing to battle with Python versions, packages, Jupyter installations, and all sort of nuances - they just want an installation they…

It only takes pip breaking once before "only free if your time has no value" becomes all too real.

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#137

Post by fipar »

jhgb wrote: post #135
AlanYx wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> Wolfram deserves some kudos for that. I feel like the other drug dealers in history might be offended at not getting at least some credit here for inventing this method.

I'm quite pro Free Software but I think that analogy is stretching it too much. In fact, I think it's so hyperbolic it ends up working against the point you're trying to make, which is one I agree with (e.g., I really like Mathematica, but I'm teaching my kid Sage for now).

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#138

Post by ianbicking »

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…

Ditto, I'd love to hear more of this talk. It feels like Wolfram/Mathematica has its own terminology, but I'd love to hear it interpreted in more mainstream programming language terms.

The symbolic evaluation is pretty novel. I assume it's not _just_ an AST. What do those structures look like?

What is the scoping? It feels like the emphasis is on global variables everywhere, but is it more subtle than that?

Are the data structures what we expect? Just in this post, Threaded implies some abstractions there. I would assume that some kind of "deferred" values are pretty typical throughout, is there a formal notion of that? A lot of it is deliberately hidden in the language, but I assume you can write code that handles that stuff directly.

Speaking of derivatives, I assume you can indicate how to take the derivative of new kinds of functions. How does that work? Generic functions, object oriented, ad hoc registries, or something else?

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#140

Post by igouy »

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…

> … in the 80-90s Java won…

Difficult for Java to win in the 80s!

> … Smalltalk implementations were closed-source and had very bad pricing…

Compared to $0 all pricing is bad pricing.

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