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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)

#131

Post by ddaygold »

rjsw wrote: post #97
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!

Doesn't BRL-CAD [1] count ? [1] http://www.brlcad.org/

I tried BRL-CAD while trying to finish my transition away from Windows to Linux. Although BRL-CAD has features that arguably make it more 'powerful' than Solidworks (the package I had learned previously), it was incredibly less intuitive to use.

To me, it seemed like a software package. Of course, it /is/ a software package, but making models in CAD doesn't feel like writing software to me. Making models in CAD reminds me of playing with LEGOs, a very visual activity. Typing in coordinates just seems wrong.

Now, I failed to effectively learn the software. It is totally possible that if I were a faster learner, or had more perseverance, I would be born again as a BRL-whisperer. I was just hung up on how wrong and difficult it felt compared to SolidWorks.

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

#132

Post by sedachv »

hga wrote: post #115
sedachv wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 y…

For this domain which is largely compute bound when it counts, for the PC systems it was targeting back in those days, C was almost certainly the right choice if you had enough resources for the extra programming work required. Commercial Macsyma is ... a special, and rather sad case. As explained to me by Danny Hillis in 1982-3 when he wished my company, LMI, could provide Lisp Machines for Thinking Machines, Inc. t…

Between Macsyma, S-Graphics, and Statice Symbolics could have been a really great software business. S-Graphics was sold off to Nichimen and developed and marketed as Mirai until the early 2000s, and the Statice guys all left to make ObjectStore. I read on Usenet somewhere that there was an unsuccessful attempt to acquire Macsyma as a separate business.

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

#133

Post by DonHopkins »

hga wrote: post #130
DonHopkins wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, with turists like Jerry Pournelle, who needs Stephen Wolfram? "Mr. Pournelle bids me tell you that if you intended to annoy him, you have succeeded, and that his next column in BYTE will have a lot to say about the ARPANET...." "One thing that is known about ARPA: you can be heaved off it for supporting the policies of the Department of Defense. Of course that was intended to anger me. If you have an ARPA accou…

Chris was really, really stupid to purge JERRYP for badthink; if Jerry had been intent on revenge vs. reform, he could have done a lot of damage to certain parties, although not of course the Internet itself, which that year was starting to be substantially extended by the NSFNet.

Threatening to sick the House Armed Services Committee on the MIT AI Lab is "badact".

And by the way, it was POURNE, not JERRYP:

    MIT Maximum Confusion PDP-10

    MC ITS.1488. PWORD.2632.
    TTY 57
    16. Lusers, Fair Share = 86%

    *:login pourne
    That account has been temporarily turned off.
    Reason:
    Think of it as evolution in action.
    Any questions may be directed to USER-ACCOUNTS
    *
And you have to admit, he did asked to be dumped off the net, so he got what he asked for (although he failed to deliver what he promised in return: seppuku):

"thank you. if left to you I suppose I cewrtainly will find my accounts terminated. Your nice private message appreciated. seppuku follows.. maybe you ought to have me dumped off the net and be done with it? or must you work through someone else? J. E. Pournelle"

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

#134

Post by lispm »

hga wrote: post #115
sedachv wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 y…

For this domain which is largely compute bound when it counts, for the PC systems it was targeting back in those days, C was almost certainly the right choice if you had enough resources for the extra programming work required. Commercial Macsyma is ... a special, and rather sad case. As explained to me by Danny Hillis in 1982-3 when he wished my company, LMI, could provide Lisp Machines for Thinking Machines, Inc. t…

> In house, Symbolics treated it with benign neglect, and I don't think it was massively improved.

There is a lot of butthurt from various people, who seem to know better how to run a company in hindsight. Symbolics sold Macsyma on various platforms: Lispm, Windows, DEV Vax, Sun Unix.

> it never got development resources commensurate with its actual status and potential.

Symbolics was still selling Macsyma at a time when competitors like LMI or TI were no longer in the Lisp business.

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

#135

Post by lispm »

sedachv wrote: post #132
hga wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For this domain which is largely compute bound when it counts, for the PC systems it was targeting back in those days, C was almost certainly the right choice if you had enough resources for the extra programming work required. Commercial Macsyma is ... a special, and rather sad case. As explained to me by Danny Hillis in 1982-3 when he wished my company, LMI, could provide Lisp Machines for Thinking Machines, Inc. t…

Between Macsyma, S-Graphics, and Statice Symbolics could have been a really great software business. S-Graphics was sold off to Nichimen and developed and marketed as Mirai until the early 2000s, and the Statice guys all left to make ObjectStore. I read on Usenet somewhere that there was an unsuccessful attempt to acquire Macsyma as a separate business.

> Between Macsyma, S-Graphics, and Statice Symbolics could have been a really great software business.

How so? Don't you think they tried and explored that? In reality in early 90s nobody was interested in Lisp anymore. Macsyma was still sold to the market, but didn't have much success. Nichimen's N-World had a small customer base, ran on SGIs (which were still expensive) and then under Windows NT. Statice on non-Lispms never left the beta status.

> I read on Usenet somewhere that there was an unsuccessful attempt to acquire Macsyma as a separate business.

That's false. See Macsyma, Inc. The company was founded in 1992 and in 1999 acquired by 'Symbolics Technology'.

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

#136

Post by xmonkee »

thanatropism wrote: post #27
tfgg wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once went to a talk by Wolfram to an audience of academics which he finished by saying that if he managed to find the theory of everything (which he seemed to think was a possibility), he probably wouldn't bother telling people, since theoretical physicists wouldn't understand it.

But isn't this the ultimate point of "science studies" (broadly put) since the days of Kuhn, Lakatos, Latour and so on? I mean, Wolfram's bizarre confirmation bias about discrete automata is (apparently) apparent to the computer-y people because we've seen discrete automata and have goofed with all sorts of complexity-generating simple formalisms (L-systems, genetic algorithms, ...) that are impressive for giggles (a…

>he thinks psychoanalysis explains human history

The kind of theoritical psychoanalysis Zizek talks about is not really classic psychoanalysis at all. Even Marxism at the lowest level is a theory of psychology.

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

#137

Post by pjmlp »

krick wrote: post #112
pjmlp wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most proper Lisps are all proprietary, what GPL scheme? None of the GPL Lisps compare to what is offered by the likes of Allegro Common Lisp and similar environments.

> None of the GPL Lisps compare to what is offered by the likes of Allegro Common Lisp and similar environments. Care to elaborate?

Allegro Common Lisp, Franz Lisp provide IDE tooling reminiscent of the Lisp Machines. With visual debuggers, graphical REPL, hypertext documentation triggered from the REPL, libraries to integrate with the OS....

Additionally their optimising compilers are quite good.

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

#138

Post by DonHopkins »

hga wrote: post #130
DonHopkins wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, with turists like Jerry Pournelle, who needs Stephen Wolfram? "Mr. Pournelle bids me tell you that if you intended to annoy him, you have succeeded, and that his next column in BYTE will have a lot to say about the ARPANET...." "One thing that is known about ARPA: you can be heaved off it for supporting the policies of the Department of Defense. Of course that was intended to anger me. If you have an ARPA accou…

Chris was really, really stupid to purge JERRYP for badthink; if Jerry had been intent on revenge vs. reform, he could have done a lot of damage to certain parties, although not of course the Internet itself, which that year was starting to be substantially extended by the NSFNet.

But I have to strongly disagree: POURNE was really, really stupid for thinking AND acting bad, and Chris/Gumby/Klotz made exactly the right call. The ARPANET was not Jerry Pournelle's government sponsored entitlement program.

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

#139

Post by liviu- »

cwyers wrote: post #69
thanatropism wrote: post #29

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. I tend to use some proprietary scientific software, but a lot of it is because academia already has already invested in codebases for, say, Stata, GAMS, Matlab and so on. But Matlab is two steps removed fr…

> 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…

I'd add Lightroom (± Silver Efex Pro) vs Darktable. It's generally hard for the (generally unpaid) open-source community to outperform something as big as Adobe.

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

#140

Post by DonHopkins »

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…

Gimp's UI is almost as awkward as its name.
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