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Wolfram Language and Mathematica version 15

writings.stephenwolfram.com

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Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica version 15

#41

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.

Cost goes down significantly for subsequent years personal. Currently at less than $200 yearly.

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica version 15

#42

I always compare the difference between Mathematica/Wolfram Language and Python to the difference between Classical Latin and English. I don't really like English from a linguistic point of view (as a non-native speaker). It's a hodgepodge of other languages and has so many exceptions, it's not very elegant. But it's so ubiquitous and useful that one basically has to know English today. On the other hand, Latin is be…

> Which one maps to Wolfram Language and which one to Python is probably obviously.

I've programmed quite a bit with both Python and Mathematica, and I've read through your comment a few times, but I still can't figure out which is which. Both languages are hodgepodges of other languages with lots of special cases (which I would consider to be a good thing since it gives you so much flexibility).

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica version 15

#43

I always compare the difference between Mathematica/Wolfram Language and Python to the difference between Classical Latin and English. I don't really like English from a linguistic point of view (as a non-native speaker). It's a hodgepodge of other languages and has so many exceptions, it's not very elegant. But it's so ubiquitous and useful that one basically has to know English today. On the other hand, Latin is be…

Latin is beautiful, but its purity and regularity may be overstated because of its prestige.

There are irregular verbs, sometimes with complete suppletive replacement of principal parts by what used to be other verbs (e.g. sum, esse, fui, futurus; fero, ferre, tuli, latum). There are verbs that use passive forms with active meaning (deponents) or perfect forms with present meaning (defectives).

There are arguably completely missing forms in the verbal inflection system (the Romans knew that some forms plausibly "should" exist, especially based on a Greek grammatical model, but simply didn't have them!).

There is sometimes unpredictability in which noun case should be used with a particular verb.

The noun declensions are apparently based on two different sets of Indo-European noun inflection paradigms, so nouns with similar nominative forms can end up being declined very differently.

There are ambiguities where different noun forms coincide, which can even create parsing ambiguities in literature (like confusion between ablatives and datives, many of which look identical).

The extent to which the perfect stem of a verb can be predicted from the present is limited, as sometimes stem reduplication is used, but sometimes just suffixation of something like -vi.

There are loanwords, even classically, from Etruscan, Greek, and to a lesser extent other Mediterranean languages (just thinking of that "hodgepodge" issue).

The meanings of purpose clauses with the verbs of fearing are arguably backwards from the English point of view (although I think the Latin version does make plenty of sense).

Native and nonnative speakers couldn't easily agree in antiquity about whether vowel length should be contrastive and (I think) whether consonant aspiration was phonemic. I guess the native speakers' opinion should matter more, except there promptly became such huge numbers of non-native speakers that they started to have a really humongous influence on the language.

There are spelling changes even within the classical period, so there isn't quite one single classical Latin orthography.

I guess there are many fewer irregular verbs overall compared to Germanic languages (which historically have had up to hundreds of at least partly irregular verbs). But if we want to count unpredictability of Latin perfect stems (which is somewhat akin to the main source of irregularity in the Germanic verbs: stem changes) as a kind of irregularity, Latin will also have quite a lot of these.

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica version 15

#44
If Stephen Wolfram really wanted wide adoption of Wolfram Language, he would give it an open-source license and release its source. As things stand it's an expensive walled garden whose costs outweigh its advantages.

A quote from the linked article: " ...year after year building an ever taller tower of ideas and technology ..."

That's an accurate description of the Wolfram empire -- every year it becomes a more expensive, less accessible, vertical tower. Meanwhile, people intent on disseminating useful knowledge do so by growing horizontally -- Python, Linux, many others, all open-source.

Historical figures would be astonished at what Wolfram is trying to do -- they would say, "Wait ... you can't patent mathematics!" No, but you can try.

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica version 15

#46

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'm aways surprised that there's no open source language that provides everything you get with Wolfram language. For example, the level of pattern matching you can use when defining functions, as well as the high level of functional composition. It is like having a mix of APL, Lisp, and Prolog that is very productive to use.

There is Mathics: https://mathics.org/

It doesn't cover the full standard library of Mathematica but the syntax is very similar and a lot of functionality is there.

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica version 15

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wolfram language is the easy part to implement Its standard library is almost impossible to reproduce in its enterity If those libraries were like regular code that got published to Github or something like that.. like pypi or npm or crates.io or whatever. And if mathematica had a lean standard library. It would be very feasible to implement a clone that's basically compatible I mean. Depending on just wolfram rather…

kimi reproduce this standard lib, make no mistakes

Tbh I fully expect someone to get the proprietary Mathematica code and somehow launder it through LLMs and pretend whatever outuput is not legally a derivative work from the original code, and then does not need to be bound by Mathematica license and can be its own open source project

Like the following dudes who are doing this, but to a project that is already open source (git):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48468904

Except that Wolfram would of course sue and we might as well see what the courts has to say about this topic

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica version 15

#48
The AI assistant complaints track with what I see on my end. Any general model I throw Wolfram Language at does noticeably worse than it does on Python. That part isn't surprising. There just isn't much public Wolfram code to learn from next to the mountain of Python sitting on github. It keeps guessing function names that sound plausible but don't exist. Spent an afternoon last week fixing hallucinated options on an NDSolve call it gave me.

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica version 15

#49

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.

Do they still offer a free license on Raspberry Pi?

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica version 15

#50
post #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

How do they stack up doing actual computer algebra things like symbolic integration?

https://www.12000.org/my_notes/CAS_integration_tests/reports...

Note that alternative open source solvers like Fricas fail 10x the integrals in that corpus.

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