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

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41–50 of 53 posts

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

#41
post #29

Wish you luck. Hope one day instead of Sage that is a bunch of Python glue for completely different and disjointed systems like Maxima, SymPy, Octave, GAP, PARI/GP, etc we will get a one well-integrated (and blazingly fast because written in Rust). I am a big supporter of open-source but after struggling with Sage and Co, decided that buying Wolfram Mathematica license is well-worth it (never regretted since). It wou…

I love the idea of Sage, and think an open-source state of the art CAS is essential in this day and age, but in trying to master it I got sick of Python.

I truly, honestly loathe the way Python handles for symbolic computation, and digging down I traced my disdain all the way to the fundamental object model of Python; so there is no way some surface-level modification will work for me.

On the one hand, it allows the sloppy "integration" of various systems (like you mention). On the other hand, it is not a real integration, just a patchwork of the worst kind. You never know what kind of interface you will face next, there is no coherence among tools, everything is its own world and you need to translate manually between them. Assuming you know the interfaces beforehand. If not... good luck.

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

#42
post #38

Really excited about this, would love to stop paying for Mathematica. I cannot adopt it until this gap is closed in the studio. Interactive 2D mathematical typesetting / notation input (front-end)

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!

Maybe through https://texmacs.org? It supports handing over beautifully typeset and semantically-structured math to various CAS

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

#43
post #38

Really excited about this, would love to stop paying for Mathematica. I cannot adopt it until this gap is closed in the studio. Interactive 2D mathematical typesetting / notation input (front-end)

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 did go back and play with it to confirm I felt as strongly as I do. I used a combination of my inputs and the notebooks available here to see how much it mattered (https://www.wolfram-media.com/products/introduction-to-calcu...)

ASCII entry is great if you already know exactly what you're doing. There's no built-in tooling to help you convert your intent to ASCII. You have to be confident that your entry accurately represents what you intended, since the input isn't typeset in the output either. And you have to be comfortable doing the translation in your head as you go back and forth across your work, fast enough that it doesn't get in the way of reading your own notebook.

A lot of what makes Mathematica notebooks valuable is that they're readable. I can't read a Woxi Studio notebook, I can only re-parse it. It seems that mathematical expressions included in text don't render in Woxi Studio either so it isn't possible to read notebooks that include math content. The ASCII position is completely reasonable for Woxi as a language; it just falls short of what Mathematica notebooks do for me.

I'm really impressed with everything else. Functions, plotting, solves — the tool works, is really fast and I'm super impressed. I might reach for your browser playground going forward. This is the type of software that makes me glad open source exists.

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

#49
post #5

I’m going to get hate here but what the heck I have karma points to burn. What I have to say is not a critique of this particular project which seems nicely done but a general statement on open source. I’d rather see more open source projects making something new than so much “Open Source reimplementation.” If closed proprietary companies are so worthless then why do so many open source projects copy those implementa…

You mean like Postgres existing when it wasn’t the first database? Why make an open source database when there was paid alternatives?

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

#50

A suggestion: I think the python api could be more useful if it returned a structured tree and possibly also could accept a structured tree. I'm guessing you're using maturin, there are some nice low energy ways of getting a tree like structure out even if you have to copy internal trees into a new version with nice python bindings. I've done similar things here https://github.com/philzook58/scryerpy https://github.c…

Good idea! Just committed the necessary changes in https://github.com/ad-si/Woxi/commit/f337a722871ad1b08f8e783.... Did I do it correctly?
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