151–160 of 191 posts
How does R compare to Mathematica for data science ?
For data science, R is probably better, just because of the wide range of common and niche statistics software.
Most languages I can understand how they work 'under the hood' but Mathematica just seems able to do things that I can barely imagine coding. E.g. A function that can produce the integral of any other arbitrary function?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
lush was sadly dynamically scoped at a time the lisp universe in general had agreed lexical scope was the way to go. I feel like it could have gotten a lot more traction if it wasn't for that. (also if I remember correctly its desktop gui libraries were windows only)
http://lush.sourceforge.net/news.html
2003-02-19: Rejoice, rejoice! Thanks to Leon, the CVS version now compiles and runs on Windoze under Cygwin. Be sure to read the README.cygwin before installing. What works: the interpreter, the compiler, the dynamic loader, X11 graphics and events. What doesn't (yet) work: external packages such as GSL, SDL, OpenGL...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think this is a true dividing line for a programming language. The Smalltalk language for instance combines both the programming environment and the language together. I don't think anyone seriously argues that smalltalk is not a programming language.
Seems like equivocation — Smalltalk is a programming language when we're using "Smalltalk" to mean Smalltalk the programming language and Smalltalk is a programming environment when we're using "Smalltalk" to mean Smalltalk the programming environment .
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't lump Mathematica and Matlab together. Not least because Matlab is almost ubiquitous in academia and in engineering while Mathematica is extremely rare.
MATLAB seems to be rapidly being displaced by python is my observation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The first time I encountered Mathematica was 30 years ago, and I genuinely thought that within a decade this would be a tool that everyone would learn in college. A few years later, when working at the university I was a bit puzzled to find that while you could find things like Matlab on the various computer labs around campus (usually running some flavor of Unix), Mathematica was nowhere to be seen. Not even on the…
> 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…
The hobbyist license wasn't priced by the year, just outright single charge. Is the by-the-year version you see one with continued upgrades?
[ Edit : the edit directly above answers this. thanks! ]
Earlier quoted context omitted.
He seems to have a very loving family, having collaborated with his son on various projects quite frequently.
People’s public and private personalities have very little correlation.
I was offering a specific counter example to your observation that he was possibly hurting those closest to him.
> His puffery essentially hurts nobody besides perhaps those close to him
I think if he was genuinely hurting the people closest to him, like his family through his brash personality, they wouldn’t want to collaborate with him on long, extended projects. Especially considering how old and intelligent his son is.
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…
That's the perspective of a software developer. Neither Mathematica nor Matlab actually try to address this market. Both are languages for mathematicians, scientists and engineers and are still mostly unrivalled when it comes to domain knowledge. Python has the domain knowledge in the datascience domain, Julia has pretty good domain knowledge in OR. No one really comes close to capturing the symbolic computation doma…
That said, I'm still a Mathematica person at heart.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately I don't think this will happen: The Wolfram Language has a _huge_ library of functions from various domains, which is where most of its strength comes from. If you had the time and money to reimplement all of them, you could just make a competing product with better API. I don't think there is enough commercial interest in running existing Wolfram Language code without Mathematica.
Exactly. Implementing the language is one thing. Mathics does it well. But implementing the vast library is much harder. (Though the essentials are possible as proved by Mathics.) Let alone assembling the countless example data it comes with. Also nitpick but you can run Wolfram code without Mathematica directly using the Wolfram Engine.