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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

#171

Post by 7thaccount »

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…

Mathematica is a computational environment based off of a notebook like interface (think Jupyter Notebooks). It's programmed using the Wolfram language which is seriously cool and powerful. You can also just write Wolfram language scripts if you don't need to graph stuff.

You can literally take a screenshot of something on your computer and copy paste it into a Mathematica function for image recognition or whatever and it will take it. It's a lot like a lisp machine in some ways. You can do advanced symbolic calculus, optimization, ML, 3D visualizations, audio processing, geographic visualizations, it has an import function that can handle practically anything, connect to databases...etc etc, all in a consistent way. Worth a look.

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#172

Post by LionTamer »

easrng wrote: post #92
jiggawatts wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you have a link for the free Raspberry api use?

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#173

Post by spoonjim »

DantesKite wrote: post #157
spoonjim wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People’s public and private personalities have very little correlation.

Yes that adage is true, but I don’t think that’s relevant in this context, since that’s not the point I was trying to make. 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,…

I wasn't talking about his family, I was talking about his professional contacts.

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#174

Post by eschaton »

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…

Wolfram Language is essentially Lisp with M-expressions instead of S-expressions, coupled with a clone of MIT’s MACSYMA symbolic mathematics system built around term rewriting.

Mathematica is the Wolfram Language plus a user interface similar to the Symbolics Dynamic Listener that acted as your command line front end. Jupyter Notebooks are quite similar since the idea of a scientist’s or engineer’s notebook where content is “live” is a pretty common one.

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#175

Post by bastawhiz »

kgwgk wrote: post #62
bborud wrote: post #47

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…

That's kind of the problem: $188/y is almost twice as much as it costs to distribute an iOS app. It's two times the cost of a hobby dyno from Heroku for a year.

What can you do with a hobby license from Wolfram? Use the software. You can't really distribute it, put it in production, or anything else besides serve your own compute needs. They forbid you from using the Home versions for any non-personal use: you can't bootstrap your startup with it. You're not allowed to get reimbursed for it by your employer. You're not allowed to use it for academic purposes. The service plan lets you use your license on a second computer, but dual boot counts as a second computer. You can't upgrade your license, you can only buy a new one. It's almost as though they don't want you to use their software.

Why would anyone who doesn't already have experience with Mathematica pay for this license?

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#177

Post by mejutoco »

323 wrote: post #163
spekcular wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What empirical evidence exists for that claim? I agree with it, but I'm mostly generalizing from own experience.

The fact that it's not wide spread is the empirical evidence. > Clearly, there is an obstacle to the acceptance of FP. I think I know what it is. The functional paradigm is an unnatural way for human beings to think. People normally view the world as comprising objects. Nobody views the world as comprising functions, unless he is trained to do so. https://richardeng.medium.com/fp-is-for-nerds-6ed1ca43bb34 > When it c…

Those sources seem to talk about the functional paradigm, when your original claim was about lisp syntax.

It took me reading Practical common lisp to appreciate the Lisp origins of Python (down to documentation strings and a lot of other details).

As a counter datapoint, I have seen people responsible for designing custom parts in Autocad (back in the day when you had to issue commands) master the lisp syntax without giving it a second thought. I found it weird for 5 minutes when I was maybe 12-14 (we had some course about it in school, I don't remember exactly)

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#178

Post by lispm »

eschaton wrote: post #174
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…

Wolfram Language is essentially Lisp with M-expressions instead of S-expressions, coupled with a clone of MIT’s MACSYMA symbolic mathematics system built around term rewriting. Mathematica is the Wolfram Language plus a user interface similar to the Symbolics Dynamic Listener that acted as your command line front end. Jupyter Notebooks are quite similar since the idea of a scientist’s or engineer’s notebook where con…

Though Lisp does not use the kind of a rule-based term rewrite system for computation, like Mathematica.

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#179

Post by kgwgk »

bastawhiz wrote: post #175
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…

That's kind of the problem: $188/y is almost twice as much as it costs to distribute an iOS app. It's two times the cost of a hobby dyno from Heroku for a year. What can you do with a hobby license from Wolfram? Use the software. You can't really distribute it, put it in production, or anything else besides serve your own compute needs. They forbid you from using the Home versions for any non-personal use: you can't…

Who does pay for this license? Someone who wants to use Mathematica, I guess.

You can get a 15-day trial, by the way.

Why would anyone pay $100+ for a couple of games? Or for Photoshop? Or for a pair ski goggles? Or for a bottle of wine? Or for a ticket to a show? Or for a radial saw?

Re: Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

#180

Post by a9h74j »

dhdc wrote: post #18
gfodor wrote: post #5

Looking forward to their AGI release, embodied in the Stephen Wolfram holographic avatar, Wolfram Wolfram

Which of course is brought to you by Stephen Wolfram, president, CEO and founder of Wolfram Research Inc., designer of Wolfram Language™ which is available in Wolfram Mathematica™.

If he had had twins he could have raised them from birth to outdo each other. Alpha-Wolfram
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