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Woxi: Wolfram Mathematica Reimplementation in Rust

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Re: Woxi: Wolfram Mathematica Reimplementation in Rust

#61
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on the list of contributors to your project, I am not sure this starting location is optimally suited to the task of building a foundation for polished, reliable, expandable software.

The sneering on HN really has no end. This is a good project! I for one am very excited to see an interpreter born out of rust.

It's a defense mechanism. I was guilty as charge as well initially. Suddenly most of your l33t skillz are trivialized and surpassed by an inhumane actor. It's a tough pill to swallow.

Re: Woxi: Wolfram Mathematica Reimplementation in Rust

#63
post #12

I love Rust for mathematical and scientific tasks (I am building the structural bio crate infrastructure), and I love Mathematica and have a personal sub. I should be the audience, but... What makes Mathematica great, IMO, is the polish and overall experience created by consistent work with applications in mind over decades. So, I look at this project with skepticism regarding its utility.

Yeah, the Mathematica language is the least interesting aspect of the Mathematica system. Closely followed by the interactive notebooks.

> Closely followed by the interactive notebooks.

Mathematica's notebooks are the only environment where I can do some computation to arrive at a symbolic expression. Copy the expression from the output cell into a new input cell. Then manipulate it by hand into the form I want. Then continue processing it further.

Also, symbolic expressions can be written nicely with actual superscripts and subscripts, and with non-latin characters.

One of the best features of Mathematica system.

Re: Woxi: Wolfram Mathematica Reimplementation in Rust

#66
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Which patent are you referring to?

Any patent. The question was who owns a (arbitrary) algorithm. The elaborated answer is that nobody “owns” an algorithm (i.e. has intellectual property rights to it) without a patent: in USA and many other jurisdictions, patents are the IP tool relating to algorithms.

Re: Woxi: Wolfram Mathematica Reimplementation in Rust

#67
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but you've got to start somewhere! And with the amount of progress I was able to make in just a few weeks, I'm very optimistic that the polish will come sooner rather than later.

Based on the list of contributors to your project, I am not sure this starting location is optimally suited to the task of building a foundation for polished, reliable, expandable software.

In that case I kindly refer you to the matter of Arkell v. Pressdam.

Re: Woxi: Wolfram Mathematica Reimplementation in Rust

#68
post #17

I love Rust for mathematical and scientific tasks (I am building the structural bio crate infrastructure), and I love Mathematica and have a personal sub. I should be the audience, but... What makes Mathematica great, IMO, is the polish and overall experience created by consistent work with applications in mind over decades. So, I look at this project with skepticism regarding its utility.

Sure, but you've got to start somewhere! And with the amount of progress I was able to make in just a few weeks, I'm very optimistic that the polish will come sooner rather than later.

i'm curious if you intend to reimplement highly optimized numerical algorithms, symbolic algorithms, and so on, accumulated and tuned in mathematica since its 1988 release?

it's a huuuuuuuuge amount of technology in the standard library of mathematica, beyond the surface syntax and rewrite system, i mean.

Re: Woxi: Wolfram Mathematica Reimplementation in Rust

#69
I regularly use Mathematica for working with symbolic expressions (for its DSolve and transfer function stuff) and it is way more maintainable and elegant to have fractions, symbols and powers rendered in math mode instead of having to deal with a text only representation. Are there any front ends (either custom or somehow extending jupyter) for this project which recreate this experience?

Re: Woxi: Wolfram Mathematica Reimplementation in Rust

#70
Have you considered doing property tests with Mathematica as an oracle?

An ai based development workflow with a concrete oracle works very well. You still need the research and planing to solve things in a scalable way, but it solves the "are the tests correct" issue.

What we've done is pull out failing property tests as a unit tests, makes regression testing during the agentic coding loop much more efficient.

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