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Mathematica 14

writings.stephenwolfram.com

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Re: Mathematica 14

#131

Post by kccqzy »

funaculi wrote: post #47
bryango wrote: post #39

Earlier 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…

It's really, really difficult to come up with a type system for mathematics. Let's just talk about Plus, the symbol for using the plus sign. What's its type? You might say it takes a few numbers and returns a new number. But what kind of number does it return? It is capable of returning machine precision numbers or their custom high precision numbers. It can return integers, rational numbers, real numbers or complex numbers, as the case may be. It is capable of working on lists of numbers and matrices of numbers, and it returns lists of numbers or matrices of numbers. But wait Mathematica doesn't require a list's elements' types to be homogeneous, so it can return different types of numbers for each element of the returned list. It is capable of working on completely undefined symbols, much like in real mathematics you expect a teenager to be able to reason about the expression `x+x+x` and simplify it to `3x` without knowing what `x` might be. It could very well leave everything the same, for example when you add two undefined symbols `x+y` and get back `x+y`.

So I personally think it is perhaps not productive to think about type systems and type signatures when working with Mathematica. But you can definitively think in terms of transformation rules. And Mathematica either documents these rules or makes these rules intuitive.

Re: Mathematica 14

#132

Post by fauria »

dang wrote: post #121

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.

What is Wolfram Derangement Syndrome?

Re: Mathematica 14

#133

Post by xhkkffbf »

fauria wrote: post #132
dang wrote: post #121

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.

What is Wolfram Derangement Syndrome?

He's a polarizing figure for some. Some people like to use the news about Mathematica to debate some of Wolfram's other work in physics or whatever. He's done quite a bit of work so there's lots to debate.

Re: Mathematica 14

#135

Post by dang »

fauria wrote: post #132
dang wrote: post #121

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.

What is Wolfram Derangement Syndrome?

> What is Wolfram Derangement Syndrome?

He writes a lot about himself in every article and makes claims that others find excessive. Commenters get triggered by this and post about how annoying it is. These reactions are just as predictable and just as fixated on Wolfram himself as he is, and in that sense are guilty of the same thing. This repetitive dynamic is what I mean by Wolfram Derangement Syndrome. It has been tedious—and therefore off topic—for many years. Here are a few past explanations in case helpful:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10978871 (Jan 2016)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10723588 (Dec 2015)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20071283 (June 2019)

There's often a lot that's interesting and thoughtful in Wolfram's pieces, stuff that's worth discussing on HN, so this is really a test for the community: can we mask out the predictable bits and focus on the interesting ones?

A few years ago, we added a guideline to https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html to cover cases like this: "Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."

Re: Mathematica 14

#136

Post by zamadatix »

lynguist wrote: post #71

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...

More accurately: Mathematica has built in and/or automatic access to object data like animals, geographic info, and statistical figures of various things. You can then use these objects in other functions to answer questions like "How similar() is this to a ${goat}" (actual syntax very different) without having to manually code the glue for similar to understand things like animal objects yourself.

That the symbolic nature of the program carries past the pure mathematics is one of the most useful things about it.

Re: Mathematica 14

#138

Post by hollandheese »

Smaug123 wrote: post #107
tempodox wrote: post #96

Mathematica is what I thought a computer would be like before I could really use one: A tool for arithmetics and math. Instead we get text processing, kitten photos and porn videos. Not that I have anything against either of these, but it was still a mild shock to find that the `ln` command does not, by a long shot, compute the natural logarithm in Unix. OK, even Mathematica makes me alias `Ln` to `Log`. So much for…

`Ln` isn't a built-in (and is syntax-highlighted as "undefined"), and searching the docs for "Ln" (or looking up the symbol with F12) gives as the first hit "Log: Log[z] gives the natural logarithm of z (logarithm to base e)". Given that in my experience mathematicians use "log" rather than "ln" (who uses base-10 logs in mathematics anyway?), is there any possible way they could have made this less surprising?

>Given that in my experience mathematicians use "log" rather than "ln"

I really don't know anyone but statisticians who do that. Everyone in my department (mathematics) and ever I've ever worked with has always used just "ln" for the natural logarithm. Why wouldn't you, it's one less character?

Re: Mathematica 14

#139

Post by Koshkin »

I remember Mathematica was included with the distribution of the OS for Raspberry Pi. I also remember it being so slow as to being unusable. I guess, you get what you pay for…

Re: Mathematica 14

#140

Post by [deleted] »

danpalmer wrote: post #23
andsoitis wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s only recently that I’ve begun to properly internalize just how broad the implications of having a computational language really are—even though, ironically, I’ve spent much of my life engaged precisely in the consuming task of building the world’s only large-scale computational language. Exemplar of humility.

It sounds like once you get the zen of Mathematica, it’s a truly exceptional tool to work with. It’s a shame that the only person it seems has get the zen of Mathematica is Stephen Wolfram himself.

[deleted]
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