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Wolfram Language and Mathematica version 15

writings.stephenwolfram.com

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Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica version 15

#51

Post by krackers »

mlpicker wrote: post #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…

>It keeps guessing function names that sound plausible but don't exist.

That's surprising considering how good their documentation is. A tool using LLM should have no problem with that. WolframLanguage is almost ideal for an LLM actually.

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica version 15

#52

Post by bloaf »

markgall wrote: post #26
ahnick wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 nee…

Does SageMath use Sympy, or is there some other integrator built in? Last I heard Sympy was one of the worst performers, even among other open source CASs.

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

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica version 15

#53

Post by krackers »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #49
brudgers wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not just on Raspberry Pi, wolfram scripting engine is free and works on windows or mac too. You lose the notebook interface, but if you're just using it as a calculator, it does the job.

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica version 15

#54

Post by alex7o »

orochimaaru wrote: post #6
Lucasoato wrote: post #2

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…

True but also for a one of piracy exists just use a cracked copy of it and be done with it

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica version 15

#55

Post by alok-g »

bloaf wrote: post #50
alok-g wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The bottom two are based on Wolfram engine itself, so would fair the same as Mathematica. I do not know about the first one.

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica version 15

#56

Post by david_rugaex »

Postosuchus wrote: post #27
SilverElfin wrote: post #9

Does anyone use this outside of college classes? It looks so great in these demos but I never hear of companies using it.

It used to be pretty popular for mathematical modeling in quantitative finance.

I work in quantitative finance. I do the vast vast majority of my algebra and stochastic calculus in Mathematica, and lots of ad hoc data visualization.

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica version 15

#57

Post by IshKebab »

alok-g wrote: post #30
Lucasoato wrote: post #2

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

> Reimplementation in Rust

It's so disappointing to see CLAUDE.md in projects like these. Basically rules it out for serious use.

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica version 15

#58

Post by alex7o »

krackers wrote: post #53
CamperBob2 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they still offer a free license on Raspberry Pi?

Not just on Raspberry Pi, wolfram scripting engine is free and works on windows or mac too. You lose the notebook interface, but if you're just using it as a calculator, it does the job.

Oh that would make a great mcp

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica version 15

#59

Post by david_rugaex »

lutusp wrote: post #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 expen…

Obviously open source is a significant virtue. Mathematica has some strength in closed source, I doubt it could be as self consistent and backwards compatible if people could depend on the implementation as the use contract as opposed to the documentation. It would obviously have had more features earlier, but would that have made the perpetual support, cointegration, or documentation suffer? I'm not blind to the downsides, but I do perceive upsides, and those may contribute to Mathematica's niche.

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica version 15

#60

Post by Maro »

everyone wrote: post #38

I just learned that Stephen Wolfram himself is a bit of a crank apparently. https://youtu.be/fO9iRDPXvT4?si=CbCjBtOSM5JhgYUF

This is well known, old news.

I would not call him a crank, he's just an "independent physicist". He is a very successful and wealthy businessman thanks to Mathematica, with $100Ms of wealth presumably, and he choses to do physics in his own way, pursuing subjects that he finds interesting, in ways he finds interesting. And he writes about his work and himself in grandiose ways, usually comparing himself to Newton and Einstein.

Nothing major has come out of his research, other then one of his co-workers proving that one of the simple CAs is Turing complete.

Most academic physicists ignore him, but that's fine. Personally, I think we need more people like Wolfram who are doing totally independent research, with their own funds. Statistically, something unexpectedly good could come out of it!

His latest research subject is Ruliology:

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2026/01/what-is-ruliolog...

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