When it’s about Mathematica I want to share this excellent codegolf question that seems to imply that Mathematica has a built-in IsGoat function: [1]
[1] https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/71631/upgoat-or...
Mathematica 14
71–80 of 154 posts
Re: Mathematica 14
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, it really is good software. It's by far the best CAS around and the "standard library" is extremely impressive. But like all software it involves tradeoffs. Fanatics of any technology or idea are never the easiest people to reason with.
Agreed, but what are the tradeoffs for Mathematica?
Mathematica has the best CAD capabilities for many/most tasks, but the language is rather horrible. E.g. code can not be commented, the program state is difficult to manage or even reset, it's very tied to the Mathematica "notebook". And it's quite idiosyncratic.
I sometimes have to use it where Sympy fails, and every time it's almost constant WTF.
And it's very proprietary and very expensive.
Re: Mathematica 14
#73Ask HN: I've never met someone who uses Mathematica, I imagine its users are even rarer outside the academic circles. I've met many who use Matlab, R, Python, Excel, etc. If you're using it, what are you using it for exactly? In what way is it irreplaceable by other tools out there, if at all?
For solving math symbolically when Sympy and Maxima fail. I don't like it at all though.
Re: Mathematica 14
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, it really is good software. It's by far the best CAS around and the "standard library" is extremely impressive. But like all software it involves tradeoffs. Fanatics of any technology or idea are never the easiest people to reason with.
Agreed, but what are the tradeoffs for Mathematica?
Comes as a big monolithical block that's much harder to work with if you have to develop bigger systems, language tooling is lacking even compared to something like Python that's already mediocre, in many aspects (data analysis/data engineering, machine learning, etc.) isn't as good as other options like Python or R.
It's also not great as a general purpose language. It was never meant as such of course, but working in a real language where I can take stuff off a notebook and have it become a script has its advantages.
Finally, I'm willing to use open-source software that's slightly worse if the difference isn't huge, and for many use cases the difference isn't huge. For some it is, and that's where Mathematica is great.
Re: Mathematica 14
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's noteworthy that Mathematica invented the notebook UI that Jupyter ended up popularizing. It has some strengths, but since its syntax highlighting is coupled to the kernel state it didn't have an undo function for the longest time. Also as big vim fan it's disappointing to not being able to use your favorite editor.
Emacs has EIN which allows you to edit and run Jupyter Notebooks. Combining that with a vim keybindings mode like Evil, you can use vim bindings on notebooks. Edit: The github page for EIN says that development has stopped. Despite this, I was able to edit a notebook with only minor inconveniences very recently.
An actively developed alternative is emacs-jupyter, which allows you to use an org file similarly to a notebook.
Re: Mathematica 14
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Joking aside, he sort of implies this in his essay explaining GPT models[1] At some level this reminds one of the idea of universal computation (and my Principle of Computational Equivalence), but, as I’ll discuss later... And his "Principle of Computational Equivalence" is [2] "There are various ways to state the Principle of Computational Equivalence, but probably the most general is just to say that almost all pro…
This is absurd and cannot be true. Shmidhuber beat both of these guys easily with his paper from decades before these amateurs even claimed to start working on it.
And tehy didn't cite him. It's a travesty.
Re: Mathematica 14
#77[stub for offtopicness]
It maybe be irrational, but the absolute arrogance of the author is off-putting and makes me reluctant to use any of his creations (which may be great I don't deny). I may have developed a heuristic that tells me to be very suspicious of people that are so sure and full of themselves as to become dangerous because they can be spectacularly wrong. It may have stemmed from the pandemic...
So, sure, you are smart and clever, but no.
Re: Mathematica 14
#78[stub for offtopicness]
It maybe be irrational, but the absolute arrogance of the author is off-putting and makes me reluctant to use any of his creations (which may be great I don't deny). I may have developed a heuristic that tells me to be very suspicious of people that are so sure and full of themselves as to become dangerous because they can be spectacularly wrong. It may have stemmed from the pandemic... So, sure, you are smart and cl…
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Re: Mathematica 14
#79[stub for offtopicness]
It maybe be irrational, but the absolute arrogance of the author is off-putting and makes me reluctant to use any of his creations (which may be great I don't deny). I may have developed a heuristic that tells me to be very suspicious of people that are so sure and full of themselves as to become dangerous because they can be spectacularly wrong. It may have stemmed from the pandemic... So, sure, you are smart and cl…
I never really got what made people so allergic to Wolfram. After the many outrages online I tried to dig and I never found anything shocking. There's not too many mention of "I" or too many self flattering hyperboles.. so I don't know.
Re: Mathematica 14
#80[stub for offtopicness]
It maybe be irrational, but the absolute arrogance of the author is off-putting and makes me reluctant to use any of his creations (which may be great I don't deny). I may have developed a heuristic that tells me to be very suspicious of people that are so sure and full of themselves as to become dangerous because they can be spectacularly wrong. It may have stemmed from the pandemic... So, sure, you are smart and cl…
I don't care about arrogance, but closed source languages have no place in the 21th century IMO. I could use it if they open sourced at least the compiler