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Do you see why this perspective is a red flag on its own?
No I don’t, review your code
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There's a mystique around Mathematica's math engine. Is this groundless, or will you eventually run into problems getting correct, identical answers -- especially for answers that Mathematic derives symbolically? The capabilities and results of the computer algebra systems that I've used varied widely.
Hard to tell honestly. So far there was always some surprisingly straight forward solution If had any problems with the math engine. There is actually a lot of public research how equations can be solved/simplified with computer algorithms. So I'm optimistic. I also stumbled upon a few cases where Mathematica itself didn't quite do things correctly itself (rounding errors, missing simplifications, etc.). So maybe it'…
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are all the tests hand written or are some agent-contributed? curious
What’s the difference if you review the code getting merged?
I'm not claiming AI-written and human-reviewed code is necessarily bad, just that the claim that reviewing code is equivalent to writing it yourself does not match my experience at all.
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Interesting, thanks for sharing. Naive question as I'm not familiar with Mathematica much (but aware of it and Wolfram Alpha and related tools), how does it compare to e.g. Jupyter or Julia or maybe another language (with its framework) that might be even closer?
I think Wolfram Language is just so much more ergonomic. No need to import dependencies - everything's included and consistent, very readable - yet compact - syntax, less gotchas than Python, R, etc., sensible default, …
Just like Python or any other language that looks easy for the learning examples, there are still hairy bits, they're just better hidden. The difference is that the debuggers for Python are far better.
Mathematica is great for quick stuff, but once you hit a particular level complexity it goes crazy. In this regard I find it similar to Bash.
Great! Math tools for everyone. what's stopping some Mathematica employee from taking the source code and having an agent port it. Or even reconstruction from the manual. Who owns an algorithm? Will everything get copied eventually?
> what's stopping some employee from something like Mathematica from taking the source code and having an agent port it to open source Laws against theft. Also the same reason employees don't release the code on pastebin or something. > Who owns an algorithm? The org or person who was granted the software patent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patent > Will everything get copied eventually? If we're lucky. Mo…
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Similarly I'm not sure Octave ever really got that polish to compete with MATLAB. SPSS is hilariously painful to use. Still it's only losing ground ever so slowly. PSPP remains almost unheard of among SPSS core users.
I am not sure Octave ever had to put on that much polish. It just had to be decent enough to save $$$$ vs a Matlab license. If it can drop-in run the code that has been keeping the lab going for decades, good enough.
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What’s the difference if you review the code getting merged?
Reviewing the correctness of code is a lot harder than writing correct code, in my experience. Especially when the code given looks correct on an initial glance, and leads you into faulty assumptions you would not have made otherwise. I'm not claiming AI-written and human-reviewed code is necessarily bad, just that the claim that reviewing code is equivalent to writing it yourself does not match my experience at all.
I find people do argue a lot about "if it is reviewed it is the same" which might be easy when you start but I think the allure of just glancing going "it makes sense" and hammering on is super high and hard to resist.
We are still early into the use of these tools so perhaps best practices will need to be adjusted with these tools in mind. At the moment it seems to be a bit of a crap shoot to me.
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Have you considered using quickcheck/random/property-based testing with LLM code generation to automate function implementation?
Yeah, I've already looked into it, but decided to keep developing it "example driven" for now. Aka I'm playing around with it, and whenever I find something that's broken I keep a note of it and then I pick those notes one by one and implement them. Once the most common things are implemented I will start writing property tests to catch all the edge cases of each feature.
So not only do you have a closed loop system that has objective/automatic pass-fail criteria you also don't even have to supply the instructions about what the function is supposed to do or the test cases!
Obviously this isn't going to be 100% reliable (especially for edge cases) but you should be able to get an enormous speed up. And in many cases you should be able to supply the edge case tests and have the LLM fix it.
(Codex is still free for the next few days if you want to try their "High"/"Extra high" thinking models)
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I am not sure Octave ever had to put on that much polish. It just had to be decent enough to save $$$$ vs a Matlab license. If it can drop-in run the code that has been keeping the lab going for decades, good enough.
MathWorks offers a huge list of "toolboxes", domain specific extensions that cover a lot of features in each domain. Replacing Matlab isn't about the core language alone.