Show HN: Woxi - Open-source Mathematica / Wolfram Language reimplementation

this is lowkey so cool

I agree. There are decades of work in Mathematica and the Wolfram Language, with a lot of carefully made design decisions, working closely with scientists in so many fields, trying to capture what is important for their work and what knowledge is worth baking into the language. I think it’s only fair to respect Wolframs decision to keep it closed source, because otherwise he and his team wouldn’t be able to continue improving the language/system.

I believe we need to be more respectful to human creators, especially now that it has become so easy to just “reimplement” someones work, to circumvent payment or license conditions or for whatever motivation. What would you do if this work didn’t exist? Well, I guess you’d have to do it yourself or use an alternative…

That being said, the Wolfram Engine is actually free for development and personal use[1]. I had a really nice experience with Wolframite[2] on Clojure as an interface layer and that works well enough for the few non-commercial things I do with it (evaluating WL expressions directly in the editor is such a nice experience!).

[1] https://www.wolfram.com/engine/free-license/

[2] https://scicloj.github.io/wolframite/

Happy paying Mathematica customer here.

I think this is great. A lot of people want to have a free alternative. For me, the real value of this is the creation of a community and setting the foundation for something better than Mathematica. I'm on the side of those that think that programming languages are a tool of thought and Wolfram lang can be extremely expressive. I love non-mainstream but useful languages.

Interesting - I would never use it as I find entering math with plain ASCII much faster and more intuitive, but if there is interest in this, I'll increase its priority!

I used Mathematica for many years for getting equations right. If you're looking for new ideas I thought being able to make approximations (other than series approximations) would have been a great addition. Examples include SVEA, plane-wave approximation, RWA, paraxial approximation, binomial approximation, etc.