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Wolfram Language and Mathematica Free on Every Raspberry Pi

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Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica Free on Every Raspberry Pi

#71

Post by meindnoch »

Dalewyn wrote: post #31
pca006132 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux is more like a walled garden than Windows? Maybe you have a different definition of walled garden or something...

Linux quickly becomes a quagmire of impracticality once you dare to step outside of the distro-provided or -recommended repositories, so much I would argue it's functionally a walled garden at that point. By contrast, on Windows you can install, run, upgrade, and downgrade whatever you want whenever you want however you want without sacrificing practicality.

>quagmire of impracticality

make && make install?

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica Free on Every Raspberry Pi

#72

Post by danuker »

neltnerb wrote: post #38
cube2222 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you expand on, for a person who only dabbled with Mathematica some time back, what that niche is?

It used to be the big differentiator was the ability to do symbolic math and actually solve equations. Maple could also do it, as could the TI89, so I never really got into it. It was just a huge difference from Matlab. But if I have an actually nasty equation to solve, like a system of differential equations with erf functions or something, I do actually go to wolfram alpha for help. It happens more often than I'd l…

The reason I might find Mathematica interesting is its language, which I found to be on my popularity-brevity Pareto frontier.

https://danuker.go.ro/programming-languages.html#non-math-ma...

So, it can express an average Rosetta Code non-math task in ~180 bytes, compared to Python, ~270, or Java, ~420. I guess this is because of its vast libraries of "batteries included".

Where it all falls apart is sharing. Nobody can run my creation, and even Mathematica Home Cloud is $194/year, which I find pretty steep, being used to free & libre software.

Monetizing is a whole different story, with commercial licenses starting at $1620/yr, which I could only justify if I already had a team wanting to learn the language and a large-ish profitable business service whose source code I wanted to convert to a locked-in solution for some reason.

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica Free on Every Raspberry Pi

#73

Post by 323 »

anthk wrote: post #42
323 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does it mean then that Windows is a walled garden? That it can only run Windows software? How is then Linux also not a walled garden?

Linux can run floss and Windows software too.

Windows can also run floss and Linux software too.

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica Free on Every Raspberry Pi

#74

Post by FrustratedMonky »

Dalewyn wrote: post #31
pca006132 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux is more like a walled garden than Windows? Maybe you have a different definition of walled garden or something...

Linux quickly becomes a quagmire of impracticality once you dare to step outside of the distro-provided or -recommended repositories, so much I would argue it's functionally a walled garden at that point. By contrast, on Windows you can install, run, upgrade, and downgrade whatever you want whenever you want however you want without sacrificing practicality.

This isn't a totally invalid point. There are so many thousands of packages and options and the learning curve can be very steep, so much so that one 'self-fences', puts up their own guard rails. So something like Windows which is walled, but a very broad pasture, seems unwalled. Whereas, linux/open source, can seem like a dangerous jungle and requires one to build their own wall.

Kind of like old zen parable about how to control cows, give them a wide comfortable pasture and then they behave, and never question the fence in the distance.

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica Free on Every Raspberry Pi

#75

Post by kilgnad »

323 wrote: post #35
msla wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Linux is a "Walled garden" the phrase has no meaning.

What does it mean then that Windows is a walled garden? That it can only run Windows software? How is then Linux also not a walled garden?

You have a point. Anyone can develop software for windows. It's not walled off at all. There are security prompts in place when you start doing unsafe things but you can pretty much do anything.

The only thing walled off is the source code but nobody is referring to that.

I think people are associating walled garden with closed source. This is not a consistent association because there is one operating system that is, in actuality, a true walled garden where the term fits:

iOS is a walled garden.

The characterization of the term here is entirely different from windows or Linux.

Thus the parent is also correct about his point. If you use a Linux distro exclusively with a package manager. It is effectively as if you are in a walled garden. It is just like using the app store on macos exclusively.

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica Free on Every Raspberry Pi

#76

Post by rg111 »

Dalewyn wrote: post #17
Y_Y wrote: post #16

I feel about this the way I feel about "free" Windows when you buy a computer from a mainstream retailer. It's not worth the price, it's not a gift, it's just an adverstisement and a gateway to the walled garden. I have a normal Mathematica license and for the few times it's the right tool for the job I find myself reaching for something else anyway. I can almost always get things done with FOSS (usually within the p…

While I understand what you are saying, using Windows as an example is bad because Windows is not a walled garden. If you want examples of a walled garden, look at MacOS/iOS, Android (kind of), and arguably even the Linuxes (question of practicality).

I am wondering what amount of head-twisting does it take to reach the conclusion that Windows is not a walled garden and Linux distros are?

Ooof. HN never ceases to amaze me.

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica Free on Every Raspberry Pi

#77

Post by prof-dr-ir »

danuker wrote: post #22
prof-dr-ir wrote: post #11

I use Mathematica frequently and, within the niche that it serves, it is starting to remind me a lot of Excel. Both are commercial software, have a low barrier to entry, are powerful enough to run the software for a nuclear power plant, have enough footguns to make this a terrible idea, and are so overused that it might be happening anyway. But I do not think we will get rid of it any time soon.

Could you illustrate some footguns of Mathematica/Wolfram Language?

Multiplication with multi-dimensional arrays comes to mind (not unlike numpy, actually). Rare bugs when simplifying symbolic expressions. Unconventional definitions of special functions. Probably several others that I am forgetting now.

More importantly there are lots of possibilities for disaster caused by the lack of typing, and complex Mathematica code quickly becomes impenetrable. Oh and version control systems are all but useless for the main ".nb" file format. Again, just like Excel.

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica Free on Every Raspberry Pi

#78

Post by lockhouse »

meindnoch wrote: post #71
Dalewyn wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux quickly becomes a quagmire of impracticality once you dare to step outside of the distro-provided or -recommended repositories, so much I would argue it's functionally a walled garden at that point. By contrast, on Windows you can install, run, upgrade, and downgrade whatever you want whenever you want however you want without sacrificing practicality.

>quagmire of impracticality make && make install?

You forgot the ./configure step which is the hard part.

For all but the most trivial of software this step is likely to fail, and often fail big and cryptically. Then you get to figure out what packages to install from your distro's repos to fix all these errors. It's even more fun when that dependency was never packaged for your distro, because then you get to install that dependency from source and repeat this entire process.

Oh, and I hope there's never a security update for any software you install from outside of the repos, because you'll never remember to update it until you need a newer version for some other reason.

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica Free on Every Raspberry Pi

#80

Post by ProllyInfamous »

rcarmo wrote: post #28

This has been a thing for a while, and if you have enough Pis, you can even run it on a clustered kernel setup - I did that a few years ago with 5 Pi 2 boards (20 cores in all): https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2016/08/10/0830

What is the relative performance of a five-cluster Pi2 setup? I would imagine much less than even a comparable expense spent for a basic home desktop.
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