All:
Please let's not do Wolfram Derangement Syndrome in HN threads. It was already a cliché here a decade ago: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... (and off HN, long before then). I've done the "stub for offtopicness" thing and moved the existing subthreads here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38972599. Please don't add more.
Mathematica 14
121–130 of 154 posts
Re: Mathematica 14
#122This is by far the most detailed announcement I have ever seen.
I find impressive the breadth and depth of Wolfram's writing. I wish I could be that productive and write that much. Nevertheless, it's exhausting to read him because his texts are full of hubris. This man needs to learn to edit himself.
Honestly someone should just suggest to him to feed his work through an LLM to dial it down. He might actually go for it.
Re: Mathematica 14
#123Ask 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?
It’s certainly the best of the symbolic computational tools that I’ve tried. However, my problem with such tools is that that they work great for simple examples in my experience but scaling them to work with non-trivial systems is rough. It may be user error on my part, but the path between simple and complex is non-obvious.
I wonder if LLMs will provide a robust path from the solid symbolic computation of Mathematica to production or productionizable code. I've seen stories show up on HN about using LLMs to e.g. transform Cobol -> Java, and have my suspicions about how and where that kind of translation could fall down with today's LLMs.
Nevertheless, I assume LLM enabled translators will improve rapidly, and that a product like Mathematica could be very well suited for translating from a prototype to a robust implementation for e.g. HPC.
Re: Mathematica 14
#124Ask 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?
I love Mathematica and I use it a lot. It's like what happens if you take Matlab, R, or Python (ie any programming language primarily used for math), and turn it into a real functional programming language. It's not irreplaceable at all, but it's a lot nicer than the alternatives.
It's generally pretty nice for any sort of mathematical programming, from designing control systems to statistics to simple graphing. It's also a pretty good language for basic scripting and data manipulation. Most of the mathematical work on my blog is done in Mathematica.
Re: Mathematica 14
#125Ask 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?
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Re: Mathematica 14
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. Incorrect. There was a precursor that had the idea Of notebook but didn’t call it that. By your logic Wolfram invented symbolic computation, Computational complexity and many other things. Let’s Not go down that route please.
I may have been incorrect because it's hard to know about everything and I have no issue to stand corrected, but please do not attack my logic by building strawmen. You could have simply stated the name of that predecessor, ideally with a link. The basis my comment for this was this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22278637 Unfortunately the Atlantic article is now paywalled.
Archive from 20220805:
Re: Mathematica 14
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Symbolic computation. Yeah, I guess you can do it in SymPy, but it's more painful. It's a really pleasant environment for certain type of work. The only thing missing is better type systems.
I’m big on types and am sympathetic to your last point, but wouldn’t introducing types in any nontrivial way break compatibility on a catastrophic scale?
I mean it can be gradual. There already are ways of compiling functions which require type annotations, just make those less of a pain in the ass.
Re: Mathematica 14
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
I heard this before, but never asked, what is so special about Mathematica that cannot be done by other softwares?
You should give it a spin. It’s an incredibly comprehensive Computer Algebra System with all the batteries included…. No, with a small nuclear reactor in the box. I’m just sad that I don’t have access anymore after college, being too cheap to pay for a license.
Get then free kernel and WLJS notebook
Re: Mathematica 14
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> And it's very proprietary and very expensive
get free kernel and wljs notebook
Re: Mathematica 14
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wolfram would like to say that he invented Mathematica all by himself, but in its core, it is basically a lisp: everything is an expression, and mathematics are just transformations of the expressions. Afaik this makes it the best tool (conceptually and practically) for generic symbolic manipulations. For example, `1 + 1` in Mathematica is just syntactic sugar for `Plus[1, 1]`, and `a = 1` is `Set[a, 1]`. I am a PhD…
Re "it is a lisp" and "everything is an expression", I would like to add a bit of clarification.Or, given that you use Mathematica regularly while I was just reading surface docs (for purposes of doing some stuff with Wolfram Alpha), rather a question if my perspective is well-founded. Based on my understanding of how expression evaluation works, the slightly more revealing statements would be "it is a lot of lisp ma…
The language is a term rewriting language. https://reference.wolfram.com/language/tutorial/Evaluation.h... covers most of the evaluation process. The documentation for functions lists out the different forms they expect.
Lisp-style macros are actually difficult to write because of the infinite evaluation of the language. I was able to write a quasiquote package for myself to help with that that though.