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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)

#101

Post by gh02t »

ska wrote: post #21
gh02t wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wolfram was young, smart, cocky He remains two of those things to this day. I have no doubt Wolfram is legitimately a genius (despite his arrogance and tendency to take credit for other people's inventions) and I adore Mathematica as it is, but I can't help but wonder how much better it would be if Wolfram's personality was less... abrasive.

I've never met him but have read some of his stuff over the years and talked to a few people who have (met him). He strikes me a clearly very smart, just not as smart as he thinks he is (not uncommon, but more rare at his level of talent I think). An aside: For what it's worth, I find the "genius" label problematic in general, not just for him. I think it's a concept that probably has useful application, but to His a…

I agree genius is overused and try to avoid it. My point was I get the impression that he might really deserve it, but his personality leaves you with a distinctly bad aftertaste. I've only met maybe 2 or 3 people I really thought deserved the label, though I guess it's hard for me to judge given that I'm certainly not one. I do however mean a genius as measured purely by ability... in my mind there is a distinction between people who have the abilities of a "genius" versus someone with the achievements of a genius. Hard work by normal people most often often produces the latter, whereas the former case is much harder to identify.

And I agree wholeheartedly... I once had students ask me why I put so much emphasis on lab reports in an [upper level engineering course]. My sincere belief is that at least 50% of working in a technical field is your ability to communicate. The most genius answer has little value if you can't properly articulate it.

ANKOS is the exact example I have in mind when I think about this. Really I find the premise that cellular automata are somehow fundamental to computation and the universe interesting (though maybe I don't buy into it to the same degree as Wolfram), but his presentation of this thesis is so dreadfully tedious and conceited as to squash any desire I might have to investigate it.

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

#102

Post by cwyers »

freeduck wrote: post #99
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.

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.

> Or Linux which as an OS far surpasses e.g. windows.

Linux is a lot cheaper than Windows. More importantly, it's a lot LOT cheaper than most proprietary Unices. And it's freely modifiable. If that makes it "better" for you, have at, I am not going to quibble.

If you are talking about Linux as a desktop, rather than server, operating system... there are reasons that Windows users outnumber Linux users on the desktop on the order of about 90 to 1. It's not all because Microsoft is evil. If you use Linux as your primary desktop operating system, I'm happy for you. If you think it's better for you, great. May you go forth and prosper. If you think Linux far surpasses Windows as a desktop operating system in the general case, then you are incredibly delusional and should seek some help.

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

#103

Post by rjsw »

_ph_ wrote: post #77
waynecochran wrote: post #70

If he had used Lisp how would he have ported it to so many machines? I programmed in Common Lisp quite a bit in grad school and I liked it, but it was always on a specific platform. I would use Lisp even now, but I'll often use C/C++ just because I know I can get it to work most everywhere.

SBCL runs pretty much everywhere: http://sbcl.org/platform-table.html

It didn't when Mathematica was being developed. CMUCL on i386 wasn't released until 1996.

Kyoto Common Lisp was available in the late 80s and was fairly portable since it compiles to C.

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

#104

Post by simonster »

cwyers wrote: post #94
simonster wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

GP was suggesting Word's superiority comes from its ability to read its own file format, which certainly makes it superior in practice, but has little bearing on OSS vs. closed source.

But, FWIW, most of the new "features" Microsoft adds to Word seem to be UI improvements (e.g. https://support.office.com/en-us/article/What-s-new-in-Word-...). And if you want to claim that Office is more usable than LibreOffice, and that this is generally true of closed source vs. open source projects, you won't get any arguments from me.

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

#105

Post by fnordsensei »

reikonomusha wrote: post #37
jwmerrill wrote: post #30

What language features distinguish Mathematica from lisp? Are we just talking about the m-expression syntax, or are there more fundamental differences?

Mathematica's evaluator is based much more on term rewriting and defaulting free variables as symbol objects. Lisp requires everything to be much more explicit (which has many pros and a few cons).

Unless you write a DSL that evaluates in the manner you want.

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

#106

Post by simonster »

patmcguire wrote: post #66
dmlorenzetti wrote: post #25

I wonder if Wolfram's 100-times-slower reference point was based on a very particular comparison. Suppose you benchmarked a numerical algorithm that dealt with a lot of matrix-vector operations. And suppose you compared, on the one hand, a C or Fortran implementation that used arrays and native machine finite-precision numbers, against a Lisp implementation that used lists and the sort of "exact" arithmetic described…

The author mentioned that the Lisp in question and Fortran could operate at the same speed. My impression is that the big use of Fortran has always been numerical algorithms with a bunch of matrix-vector operations — is that not the case? Because if it was like against like it doesn't make any sense, but if Lisp were as fast at matrix operations I figure we still wouldn't be using LAPACK for that stuff.

Matrix-vector operations are part of BLAS, and most performant BLAS packages (e.g. MKL and OpenBLAS) are written in assembly or machine-generated using a special-purpose codegen. You can't write the gemv/gemm kernel in any general-purpose language and expect to beat modern BLAS. But you can call BLAS/LAPACK from whatever language you want. This is how MATLAB succeeds even though it has a dog-slow interpreter.

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

#107

Post by krick »

kuschku wrote: post #82
the_af wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did I misunderstand or are you arguing GIMP is for "padding developer CVs"? That's a... fringe opinion, to say the least.

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)

I wonder how so many people manage to use "totally unusable" program. Krita is nice and all, but it's quite different product than GIMP, designed specifically for drawing, when GIMP is sort of "general stuff", like Photoshop is. And Krita is free and open source as well, so it doesn't support the original claim.

And GIMP doesn't really lack many features Photoshop has, and even has some that Photoshop doesn't. UI could be much better (especially controls for transformations), but it's not that horrible either. The reason why GIMP sucks in comparison with Photoshop is that few features it lacks are absolutely game-changing. Like effect masks. If you use effect masks (and pretty much every proficient Photoshop user does), software without them is not an option for you. And I believe it isn't that easy to introduce them to GIMP either.

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

#108

Post by codeflo »

carlob wrote: post #62
reikonomusha wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not sure they are quite equivalent, the semantics of pattern matching tend to be different: in lisps lists are always a kind of binary tree so (list 1 2 3) is really (1 . (2 . (3 . nil))), this has a consequence for unification in that (list 1 2 3) will match (x y) as 1 and (list 2 3). In Mathematica on the other hand lists tend to be flatter if you will, and there is this concept of Sequence which I sometimes fi…

I don't think that's true: (x y) is (x . (y . nil)) and shouldn't match (1 . (2 . (3 . nil))), because nil would have to match (3 . nil).

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

#109

Post by adwf »

coldtea wrote: post #50
adwf wrote: post #17

Wolfram has always seemed to me to have the biggest case of "Not Invented Here" syndrome I've ever heard of. I mean, not only did he have to make his new language, new search engine, etc. He even tried to make a new kind of science... If that's not extreme NIH, I don't know what is.

> If that's not extreme NIH, I don't know what is. Worked well for him though...

Absolutely; I'm not knocking his achievements. It's a rare intelligence who can work through NIH and succeed so well.

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

#110

Post by tingol »

cwyers wrote: post #102
freeduck wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Or Linux which as an OS far surpasses e.g. windows. Linux is a lot cheaper than Windows. More importantly, it's a lot LOT cheaper than most proprietary Unices. And it's freely modifiable. If that makes it "better" for you, have at, I am not going to quibble. If you are talking about Linux as a desktop, rather than server, operating system... there are reasons that Windows users outnumber Linux users on the desktop…

>I am not going to quibble >I'm happy for you >You are incredibly delusional and should seek some help

Yeah you seem unbiased...

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