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Launching Mathematica 10

blog.stephenwolfram.com

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Re: Launching Mathematica 10

#71

ZIPCodeData and many other geographic functions are missing and have badly mangled documentation. I assume something went wrong in an automated build process. This is on the Mac OSX release. So far ZIPCodeData[], NeighborhoodData[] and MountainData[],BroadcastStationData[], MovieData[], BuildingData[], PersonData[] are all mangled. Worse yet, URLFetch is broken also. Something bad happened, at least with the Mac rele…

What is your value of $Version and SystemInformation["Small"]? I can't replicate these problems on any of the 3 platforms using freshly-downloaded versions.

Would having an old version installed make a difference? I renamed my current install to "mathematica backup.app" then installed mms 10. It feels like some part of mms has failed without adequately reporting it.

Mac OSX 10.9.4

uname -a Session log below.

Mathematica 10.0 for Mac OS X x86 (64-bit) Copyright 1988-2014 Wolfram Research, Inc.

In[1]:= $Version

Out[1]= 10.0 for Mac OS X x86 (64-bit) (June 29, 2014)

In[2]:= $VersionNumber

Out[2]= 10.

In[3]:= SystemInformation["Small"]

Out[3]= {Kernel ->

> {SystemID -> MacOSX-x86-64, ReleaseID -> 10.0.0.0 (5098698, 5098537),

> CreationDate -> DateObject[{2014, 6, 29}, TimeObject[{20, 38, 32}]]},

> FrontEnd ->

> {OperatingSystem -> $Failed, ReleaseID -> Missing[NotActive],

> CreationDate -> DateObject[$Failed]}}

In[4]:= URLFetch["http://www.google.com/"]

General::unavail: ExportString is not available in this version of the Wolfram Language.

ImportString::string: First argument ExportString[{60, 33, 100, 111, 99, 116, 121, 112, 101, 32, 104, 116, 109, 108, 62, 60, 104, 116, 109, 108, 32, 105, 116, >, 111, 100, 121, 62, 60, 47, 104, 116, 109, 108, 62}, >] is not a string.

Out[4]= ImportString[ExportString[{60, 33, 100, 111, 99, 116, 121, 112, 101,

> 32, 104, 116, 109, 108, 62, 60, 104, 116, 109, 108, 32, 105, 116, 101,

-- Snip --

In[5]:= ExportString[]

ExportString::argrx: ExportString called with 0 arguments; 2 arguments are expected.

Out[5]= ExportString[]

Re: Launching Mathematica 10

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you can get Raspi, I believe it already had pre-release version of the version 10 for while. Just, it will be slow...

Can the RPi version use Wolfram Cloud to speed it up?

You can see it rendering its buttons and menus.. slowly. Typing may take 10 seconds to respond. It is completely unoptimized for ARM, or at least was when I tried it.

Re: Launching Mathematica 10

#73

I hate to be that guy, but I wish to share my opinion about closed source mathematical software. There is no doubt that what Wolfram Research has done with Mathematica is amazing and tempting. It is a very complete and uniform engine, and can be very useful for very different kinds of mathematics. However, Wolfram Research deliberately keeps their methods and source code closed. Note that this is more serious than ju…

I think you are a bit confused. I would compare Mathematica to a an old digital desktop calculator. Nobody who used those wanted to see their insides. The point in Mathematica is not that they have some closed source pixie dust that no one else can understand or implement. The value of the software comes from the fact that you need a lot of grunt work in a large software package to maintain user experience - fix all the unfun bugs etc - and very few open source projects manage to attract enough interest to have people do also the gruntwork and not the interesting new development or 'cool refactorings'.

Re: Launching Mathematica 10

#74

I hate to be that guy, but I wish to share my opinion about closed source mathematical software. There is no doubt that what Wolfram Research has done with Mathematica is amazing and tempting. It is a very complete and uniform engine, and can be very useful for very different kinds of mathematics. However, Wolfram Research deliberately keeps their methods and source code closed. Note that this is more serious than ju…

While well-meaning, sentiments like these are part of the problem. The proposed frame is "mathematica is somewhat better in polish and functionality, but we should stick to OSS on principle." The problem is, by this argument, no will actually ever know what Mathematica is, what it does, and what cool ideas it had that could potentially inspire further work. All the examples of alternative software have lots to learn…

That doesn't preclude Wolfram releasing the source code for the calculation engine.

Re: Launching Mathematica 10

#75
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Associations use the same basic algorithm as Scala and Clojure's hashmaps, and are indeed persistent. And b[x] there gives 1 as you would expect.

Do you know when that change was put into place? I have been using Mathematica sense version 5 and my intuition was that `b[x] == 3`. Testing in mathematica 8 which I have on hand confirms this.

Mathematica 8 doesn't have associations, so you must be testing symbol assignments.

Write a = before running the above code to test this on associations; associations are persistent, the symbol table is not.

Re: Launching Mathematica 10

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your value of $Version and SystemInformation["Small"]? I can't replicate these problems on any of the 3 platforms using freshly-downloaded versions.

Would having an old version installed make a difference? I renamed my current install to "mathematica backup.app" then installed mms 10. It feels like some part of mms has failed without adequately reporting it. Mac OSX 10.9.4 uname -a Session log below. Mathematica 10.0 for Mac OS X x86 (64-bit) Copyright 1988-2014 Wolfram Research, Inc. In[1]:= $Version Out[1]= 10.0 for Mac OS X x86 (64-bit) (June 29, 2014) In[2]:=…

Looks like it... I would delete both from disk, redownload 10, and reinstall it. Also check that you didn't run out of disk space.

If all else fails, phone our technical support at 1-800-WOLFRAM, they're pretty good.

Re: Launching Mathematica 10

#77
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can the RPi version use Wolfram Cloud to speed it up?

You can see it rendering its buttons and menus.. slowly. Typing may take 10 seconds to respond. It is completely unoptimized for ARM, or at least was when I tried it.

It's true it can't use libraries like the Intel Performance Primitives on ARM, but that's not why the UI is slow on RPi. RPi's UI is slow because all graphics-intensive GUI stuff on RPi is slow. Firefox is unusable, for example.

Re: Launching Mathematica 10

#78
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression is that you don't hate to be that guy, but actually love to express this opinion. Open source systems like Sage always look desirable, simply by virtue of being open source. But every time I look at it I'm left with a very bad taste in the mouth because of the constant badmouthing of non-open-source systems that is going on in that community. Companies do that sort of thing, and it doesn't inspire trust…

> actively pointing out to people (as Mr. Hermoso did to me) that no you can't link Octave to Mathematica because Octave is GPL (which is just a hindrance for my research, as well as to others) What exactly did you want to do? GPLv3 (which is the license Octave uses) does not always prohibit linking GPLv3 code with proprietary code. In particular, if you want to hack up a private copy of Octave for your own use, and…

We were considering making http://matlink.org/ compatible with Octave. The feedback I got on this was part of why this wasn't done. To make MATLink user friendly, it needs to come with compiled binaries, which would be linked against Mathematica's closed source MathLink library.

If it is the case that GPL doesn't forbid this, I'd love to hear about it.

Re: Launching Mathematica 10

#79
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you put your finger on it... people talking about Mathematica/Wolfram Language as a CAS are really chasing an idea of what it was 10 or 15 years ago. Maybe I'm naive but I think that we really can just "all get along" -- notebook-based programming is just one example of how ideas can incubate in closed-source projects, and end up benefiting open-source projects. I'm hoping knowledge-based computation ends up…

Mathematica is decades ahead of LightTable

Can you list the things that Mathematica does that you think LightTable "should" do?

Re: Launching Mathematica 10

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would having an old version installed make a difference? I renamed my current install to "mathematica backup.app" then installed mms 10. It feels like some part of mms has failed without adequately reporting it. Mac OSX 10.9.4 uname -a Session log below. Mathematica 10.0 for Mac OS X x86 (64-bit) Copyright 1988-2014 Wolfram Research, Inc. In[1]:= $Version Out[1]= 10.0 for Mac OS X x86 (64-bit) (June 29, 2014) In[2]:=…

Looks like it... I would delete both from disk, redownload 10, and reinstall it. Also check that you didn't run out of disk space. If all else fails, phone our technical support at 1-800-WOLFRAM, they're pretty good.

I checked the MD5sum given on the wolfram website (b58c6bb7393f23137355da923f2734fc), they match.

Completely removing my previous copy of Mathematica and nuking my ~/Library/Mathematica directory made the documentation formatting errors go away. I'm not sure if that was the cause or not.

However, I still get ExportString messages out of many functions.

General::unavail: ExportString is not available in this version of the Wolfram Language.

EDIT: I'm trying to hunt down why I get the unveil error message. Might this be a limitation of a trial mathematica license?

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