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Why Wolfram Mathematica did not use Lisp (2002)

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Re: Why Wolfram Mathematica did not use Lisp (2002)

#91

Post by chipotle_coyote »

thanatropism wrote: post #71
cwyers wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mathematica is an interesting case study for a general-purpose software package that happens to be more feature-full and functional -- not just "more convenient" or "better UX" -- than any open-source counterparts. Isn't the world littered with such examples? Office is more feature-full than OpenOffice, Photoshop is more feature-full than GIMP, Illustrator is more feature-full than Inkscape, InDesign is more featur…

OpenOffice is "good enough"; where Word isn't an option, it does the job. GIMP isn't even trying; it's not in the same market as Photoshop or casual image editing, which is well served by web apps these days. (One wonders what it is for; padding developer CVs, possibly) Finally, nonlinear video editing hardly qualifies for "general purpose" -- and is there anything worth mentioning as for open source offerings? Mathe…

OpenOffice is "good enough"...

This is a matter of debate, depending on what circles you're traveling in. If you're working in a "mixed environment" where some people are using OpenOffice and some people are using Microsoft Word, you're likely to run into problems that range from minor annoyance to show-stoppers very quickly. Some of this can be blamed on Microsoft's weird file formats, but this is true not only for .doc files but for the better-documented (if arcane) .docx and, in my experience, even with RTF. I'm in contact with a fair number of small-to-medium press fiction editors, and while a fiction manuscript is one of the simplest use cases you can imagine in terms of formatting, almost every editor I've talked with has complained about OpenOffice (and to a lesser degree LibreOffice) screwing up comments and revision tracking. I don't really want to use Microsoft Word, but so far I haven't found an open source equivalent for my needs that is good enough. (The closed source Nisus Writer Pro and even Apple Pages seem to do better, ironically. But that's not to say they don't have their own problems.)

I tend to think of open source's most well-established terrain as languages and server-side components where UI is not really a major issue.

Re: Why Wolfram Mathematica did not use Lisp (2002)

#92

Post by sedachv »

brudgers wrote: post #56
anthony_d wrote: post #6

Seems like a good example of technical people placing too much importance on a technical decision. It seems clear Lisp would have been a perfectly fine choice, as would a number of other languages. It also seems unlikely the world (or even Mathematica) would be dramatically different for it. I wish more "X is better than Y because of Z" discussions would admit aesthetics were an important factor. Instead we end up wi…

Wolfram's decision at worst did not impede the development of a tremendously successful software product. At best it enabled it. Mathematica is 27 years old. It predates the i486 which was the first mass market CPU with an FPU. In the early 1980's betting on Lisp was betting on Lisp machines and workstation class hardware. The first version of Mathematica ran on M68000 Macintosh machines. It's hard to imagine overcom…

> The first version of Mathematica ran on M68000 Macintosh machines. It's hard to imagine overcoming the pain that something slower than C would have inflicted on users.

According to this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macsyma#Commercialization) Wikipedia article, Macsyma (a Lisp-based CAS that Mathematica was designed to compete with) was running on 68000 Sun-1s in the mid-80s and a Windows port came out about a year after Mathematica came out for the Macintosh (1989 and 1988, respectively). The pain must have been real because Mathematica ended up with all of Macsyma's market: "Macsyma's market share in symbolic math software had fallen from 70% in 1987 to 1% in 1992"

Re: Why Wolfram Mathematica did not use Lisp (2002)

#93

Post by simonster »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #91
thanatropism wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenOffice is "good enough"; where Word isn't an option, it does the job. GIMP isn't even trying; it's not in the same market as Photoshop or casual image editing, which is well served by web apps these days. (One wonders what it is for; padding developer CVs, possibly) Finally, nonlinear video editing hardly qualifies for "general purpose" -- and is there anything worth mentioning as for open source offerings? Mathe…

OpenOffice is "good enough"... This is a matter of debate, depending on what circles you're traveling in. If you're working in a "mixed environment" where some people are using OpenOffice and some people are using Microsoft Word, you're likely to run into problems that range from minor annoyance to show-stoppers very quickly. Some of this can be blamed on Microsoft's weird file formats, but this is true not only for…

Microsoft doesn't have the greatest support for OpenOffice/LibreOffice odt either, although they try (https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Differences-between...).

The fact that 90% of the world is using Microsoft's format is certainly relevant for everyday use, but it's orthogonal to the question of whether an open source project can achieve feature parity with a closed source product.

File format compatibility is always hard and I'm not convinced MS does a better job reading odt than LibreOffice does with OOXML. But LibreOffice does have a reasonably comparable feature set, even if the UI is not as attractive.

Re: Why Wolfram Mathematica did not use Lisp (2002)

#94

Post by cwyers »

simonster wrote: post #93
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenOffice is "good enough"... This is a matter of debate, depending on what circles you're traveling in. If you're working in a "mixed environment" where some people are using OpenOffice and some people are using Microsoft Word, you're likely to run into problems that range from minor annoyance to show-stoppers very quickly. Some of this can be blamed on Microsoft's weird file formats, but this is true not only for…

Microsoft doesn't have the greatest support for OpenOffice/LibreOffice odt either, although they try ( https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Differences-between... ). The fact that 90% of the world is using Microsoft's format is certainly relevant for everyday use, but it's orthogonal to the question of whether an open source project can achieve feature parity with a closed source product. File format compatibilit…

> LibreOffice does have a reasonably comparable feature set

Pile up all the features Office has but LibreOffice doesn't on one side, pile up all the features that LibreOffice has but Office doesn't on the other. What pile's larger?

It's kind of a pointless argument over whether or not LibreOffice has ENOUGH features; enough features for who? It's a global question with local answers. It's pretty easy to count who has MORE features, though, and Microsoft Office wins there.

Re: Why Wolfram Mathematica did not use Lisp (2002)

#95

Post by frou_dh »

the_af wrote: post #85
kuschku wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, GIMPs UI at least is totally unusable. I ended up using Krita instead, which actually has a UI that makes sense. Additionally, even Krita supports a lot more stuff than GIMP – from proper animations, keyframes to all kinds of color spaces. (Yes, 32-bit floats for CMYK color spaces are possible in Krita)

Yes, GIMP's UI is pretty awkward. No disagreement here. Still, for a lot of people, GIMP is a very valuable open source alternative to Photoshop; not as full-featured, of course, but then again, nothing is. There are lots of tutorials for achieving interesting effects using GIMP. I've never heard it described as something people learn to pad their resumes. Krita is pretty cool, too. If I'm not mistaken, it's not a fu…

Presumably they meant the resumes of those working on GIMP, not users of it.

Re: Why Wolfram Mathematica did not use Lisp (2002)

#96

Post by gress »

cwyers wrote: post #90
IshKebab wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I don't know why he things it is rare. It's rarer that open-source software is more featureful and functional than competing closed source software. In fact I'm struggling to think of any that are clear-cut. The opposite is very common, as your list demonstrates. Also another big category is CAD, and CAM. There are no decent open source programs in that space at all!

> It's rarer that open-source software is more featureful and functional than competing closed source software. In fact I'm struggling to think of any that are clear-cut. I think the canonical example has been web browsers, for instance.

What is the example web browser?

Re: Why Wolfram Mathematica did not use Lisp (2002)

#97

Post by rjsw »

IshKebab wrote: post #87
cwyers wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mathematica is an interesting case study for a general-purpose software package that happens to be more feature-full and functional -- not just "more convenient" or "better UX" -- than any open-source counterparts. Isn't the world littered with such examples? Office is more feature-full than OpenOffice, Photoshop is more feature-full than GIMP, Illustrator is more feature-full than Inkscape, InDesign is more featur…

Yeah I don't know why he things it is rare. It's rarer that open-source software is more featureful and functional than competing closed source software. In fact I'm struggling to think of any that are clear-cut. The opposite is very common, as your list demonstrates. Also another big category is CAD, and CAM. There are no decent open source programs in that space at all!

Doesn't BRL-CAD [1] count ?

[1] http://www.brlcad.org/

Re: Why Wolfram Mathematica did not use Lisp (2002)

#98

Post by cwyers »

gress wrote: post #96
cwyers wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's rarer that open-source software is more featureful and functional than competing closed source software. In fact I'm struggling to think of any that are clear-cut. I think the canonical example has been web browsers, for instance.

What is the example web browser?

Firefox and Chromium vs Internet Explorer.

Re: Why Wolfram Mathematica did not use Lisp (2002)

#99

Post by freeduck »

cwyers wrote: post #90
IshKebab wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I don't know why he things it is rare. It's rarer that open-source software is more featureful and functional than competing closed source software. In fact I'm struggling to think of any that are clear-cut. The opposite is very common, as your list demonstrates. Also another big category is CAD, and CAM. There are no decent open source programs in that space at all!

> It's rarer that open-source software is more featureful and functional than competing closed source software. In fact I'm struggling to think of any that are clear-cut. I think the canonical example has been web browsers, for instance.

Or Linux which as an OS far surpasses e.g. windows. It runs on any hardware you can imagine from satellites to hand-held devices and the majority of the super-computers in the world.

Re: Why Wolfram Mathematica did not use Lisp (2002)

#100

Post by fnordsensei »

reikonomusha wrote: post #38
orbifold wrote: post #23

This might be obvious to many, but the language of Mathematica has better support for ("abstract") currying than Lisp, something like A[B, C][X, Y][Z] does not straightforwardly translate into an S-Expression but is potentially convenient for symbolic algebra. I believe that I read this emphasis on currying in one of Wolfram's own accounts on how Mathematica came to be. It is probably also important that the internal…

It translates very directly. (((A B C) X Y) Z) We could clean up this syntax and write a macro. Let's call that M. Then one could write (M A (B C) (X Y) (Z)) The definition of M is quite simple. Secondly, Lisp only uses lists for the representation of most of its source code. Actual computational data structures of course need not be lists. Mathematical expressions need not be represented as lists in Lisp.

In Clojure,

  (-> A [B C] [X Y] [Z])
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