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Wolfram Language and Mathematica version 15

writings.stephenwolfram.com

21–30 of 125 posts

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica version 15

#21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not industry, but it's pretty popular among theoretical physics researchers.

I had it in an engineering inner sanctum of Apple. had used it since it came out in 1988 on campus in Illinois, and folks in Apple definitely knew it. Not sure who all was doing what with it.

Steve Jobs and Stephen Wolfram were friends for years. Mathematica shipped preinstalled on early NeXT systems.

SJ recommended some of the UI bits of the notebook. Particularly the separators between cells.

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica version 15

#22

I’ve used Mathematica at university, it’s so great! Creating fractals, animations and so on is so easy and intuitive. The problem though is that Wolfram is a walled garden. When you think about integrating it in an enterprise environment, you get hit by such high costs, it stops making sense. Imagine if they open sourced it, I feel like their products have so much utility, buried deep down Wolfram ecosystem and conve…

It doesn't make sense even for academia. Reproducibility is an issue and as we've seen with recent fraudulent claims in major publications - it's what is going to be used for verification of research. Many years back while in grad school I could not reproduce a result from a paper. Thankfully they had provided the data as public but not the code. I emailed the authors and got some matlab code back. My university didn…

The situation you’re describing is probably why Python is the defacto language of Machine Learning to this day.

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica version 15

#23

I’ve used Mathematica at university, it’s so great! Creating fractals, animations and so on is so easy and intuitive. The problem though is that Wolfram is a walled garden. When you think about integrating it in an enterprise environment, you get hit by such high costs, it stops making sense. Imagine if they open sourced it, I feel like their products have so much utility, buried deep down Wolfram ecosystem and conve…

Wolfram is $4000/seat for a perpetual commercial license with support. [1] $4000 will only buy a middling Mac Tool tool chest…and not the tools to put in it.

[1] a personal perpetual license is only $400.

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica version 15

#25
post #19

symbolic music features are interesting! they should add chroma!

I saw those and got excited; I've been using Mathematica for decades and do a lot of work with symbolic music.

Unfortunately they are extremely surface level in this release. It looks like there isn't even any ability to load/export MusicXML, kind of weird low level primitives and zero interesting higher level functions. Hopefully they keep iterating on it but I don't think it'll be useful for my workflow right now.

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica version 15

#26
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still nowadays? My impression is that in (pure) math it's lost most of its market share in the last few years. But maybe that's only in my circles.

what do you or others use instead?

Probably the most general-purpose one is SageMath, which is open-source and basically Python with a ton of sophisticated math stuff built into it. Everything I used to do in Mathematica I now do in sage, and I don't think I'm the only one. Probably field-dependent though.

Of course there is a whole constellation of more specialized things in certain fields, that has come a long way in the last 15 years. So people needing things like that no longer kludge things together in Mathematica.

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica version 15

#28
post #24

Hissab - https://hissab.io is a Free and opensource alternative to Wolfram

Here are some other alternatives (some internally use free Wolfram engine):

Reimplementation in Rust: https://github.com/ad-si/Woxi

WLJS Notebook: https://wljs.io

VS Code extension: https://github.com/vanbaalon/wolfbook

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica version 15

#29

I’ve used Mathematica at university, it’s so great! Creating fractals, animations and so on is so easy and intuitive. The problem though is that Wolfram is a walled garden. When you think about integrating it in an enterprise environment, you get hit by such high costs, it stops making sense. Imagine if they open sourced it, I feel like their products have so much utility, buried deep down Wolfram ecosystem and conve…

I loved Mathematica. I was so sad about having to use Python math packages in industry.

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica version 15

#30

I’ve used Mathematica at university, it’s so great! Creating fractals, animations and so on is so easy and intuitive. The problem though is that Wolfram is a walled garden. When you think about integrating it in an enterprise environment, you get hit by such high costs, it stops making sense. Imagine if they open sourced it, I feel like their products have so much utility, buried deep down Wolfram ecosystem and conve…

Here are some alternatives (some internally use free Wolfram engine):

Reimplementation in Rust: https://github.com/ad-si/Woxi

WLJS Notebook: https://wljs.io

VS Code extension: https://github.com/vanbaalon/wolfbook

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