Really excited to try the new SQL interface. The old one was less than pleasant to work with.
The Unity stuff is kind of unexpected and I’m curious to try that out too.
...Now I just have to see if my student license lets me upgrade...
Mathematica Version 12 Released
21–30 of 124 posts
Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly I read most of those reasons as reasons for not being free and community-driven as opposed to not being open-source, and also more as a post-hoc justification than a prediction on what will happen in the future. As a matter of fact a large part of the Mathematica codebase is inspectable (the part that is written in Mathematica itself) [1]. Disclaimer: I'm a Wolfram employee, but these are my opinions and any…
Most of Matlab's source code is visible too and its license allows you to modify its visible source code and share it with other license holders too. But that's still not enough and that's why I still sometimes work on Octave (although I've been semi-inactive for the past few years). Freedom isn't a spectrum; it really is all or nothing. Unless we're all free all the way, none of us is. It's not fair of me to share M…
One of the directions the company is taking to address this is to allow for running some things as a free tier on the cloud.
But I think the open vs. closed source discussion in academic research is not really about that: lots of Mathematica code is fairly concise and highly automated.
Let me make an example: suppose you're minimizing some complicated function and you claim to have found some minimum with Mathematica. Your source code looks like NMinimize[complicatedFunction[x], {x, 0}]. If I wanted to reproduce your result I would not need to use Mathematica, but access to the internals would allow me to see what tricks I need in terms of minimization method used, whether or not extended precision was necessary, etc...
Being able to rerun that black box minimization independently for free is not really reproducing my result, because we might both be observing the same bug in Mathematica.
Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released
#23I encourage everyone to watch at least one of the many livestreams[1] that Stephen Wolfram did while putting together this release. They changed my perception of Stephen, which I had gotten from the critiques of him that are everywhere on the internet. He is perpetually obsessed with his creation and does not accept mediocrity from his developers; but does so without attacking or belittling anyone, or feeling superio…
Yeah he’s like not always nice, but he’s certainly not how I thought.
The streams convey a much better personality than his talks or his writing.
Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released
#24I really think that Mathematica and Matlab failed to capitalize on the rise of AI and ML in the last decade. Seems like Python is the only go-to language these fields.
It has typical Keras net types and algos and nice interactive widgets for watching it run. It works on CUDA as well.
Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released
#25Really excited to try the new SQL interface. The old one was less than pleasant to work with. The Unity stuff is kind of unexpected and I’m curious to try that out too. ...Now I just have to see if my student license lets me upgrade...
> Really excited to try the new SQL interface. The old one was less than pleasant to work with.
Cool! I hope people find it useful, that's where most of my past year and a half went :)
Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released
#26I know I'm dreaming, Stephen is rather on the opposite side, but if he would open source it all/most of it, he'd be one of the most famous people around. I wonder how he'd move financially wise with that kind of bold move?
https://mathics.github.io/ is open source partial clone. Frankly with out a source of income it wouldn't be what it is today.
Mathics is neat, but it is mostly an interface for a small part of the Sympy library and tries to mimic in a partial ad-hoc way the Mathematica syntax. Mathics also seems to be on life-support in terms of developer activity.
Sympy or Sage are much better examples of open source computer algebra systems, but they lack the pattern-matching weirdly-lispy language design of Mathematica (the Wolfram language, which while certainly weird, is very powerful).
Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of Matlab's source code is visible too and its license allows you to modify its visible source code and share it with other license holders too. But that's still not enough and that's why I still sometimes work on Octave (although I've been semi-inactive for the past few years). Freedom isn't a spectrum; it really is all or nothing. Unless we're all free all the way, none of us is. It's not fair of me to share M…
That's not true at all. Lots of the actual Matlab code (i.e. code written in matlab) is available. But none of Matlab itself is. That's where their value is. Octave has fairly easily replicated a huge amount of the mathsy part, but is their GUI or plotting code any good? Not when I last tried it.
Prepare to have your mind blown, friend, try `type trapz` or `type cumtrapz` in Matlab and read Mathworks-written m-file code to your heart's content (but if you do, you're disqualified from ever contributing to Octave). Or even try `edit xlsread` to edit that source code.
Less excitingly, read its EULA. I can't find a copy of it because they don't publish it, but I do remember a part that allowed you to modify and distribute Mathworks-written m-code to other Matlab license holders.
Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of Matlab's source code is visible too and its license allows you to modify its visible source code and share it with other license holders too. But that's still not enough and that's why I still sometimes work on Octave (although I've been semi-inactive for the past few years). Freedom isn't a spectrum; it really is all or nothing. Unless we're all free all the way, none of us is. It's not fair of me to share M…
One of the directions the company is taking to address this is to allow for running some things as a free tier on the cloud. But I think the open vs. closed source discussion in academic research is not really about that: lots of Mathematica code is fairly concise and highly automated. Let me make an example: suppose you're minimizing some complicated function and you claim to have found some minimum with Mathematica…
I believe your job depends on you defending black boxes, but black boxes have no place in science or mathematics, at least not any black boxes that we create ourselves. That's my point. I shouldn't just tell you "minimise, this function, it worked" (or it didn't, who knows why). We should both be able to see exactly what that minimisation did and why it did or did not work.
Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released
#29I know I'm dreaming, Stephen is rather on the opposite side, but if he would open source it all/most of it, he'd be one of the most famous people around. I wonder how he'd move financially wise with that kind of bold move?
Seems like he's far from open sourcing it. His team just published a long blog post ( https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-op... ) explaining why they're closed source.
...none of that makes any sense!
There's a lot of open source tech out there with 90% centralized design and decision making. Most open-source databases. Haskell and OCaml programming languages also have small groups of core devs... I think even Julia development is controlled by a very small group of people.
Open source the core language if you want it to survive, otherwise it will be completely forgotten and lost from history! Closed source programming languages have no chances of survival and increased adoption, even Microsoft and Apple know this now!
(Sure, keep closed the UI + some modules with truly innovative proprietary algorithms, bc most of your paying customers will keep buying your paid versions, you won't loose the revenue stream.)
Anyway, it's too late anyway...
Re: Mathematica Version 12 Released
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the directions the company is taking to address this is to allow for running some things as a free tier on the cloud. But I think the open vs. closed source discussion in academic research is not really about that: lots of Mathematica code is fairly concise and highly automated. Let me make an example: suppose you're minimizing some complicated function and you claim to have found some minimum with Mathematica…
I believe your job depends on you defending black boxes, but black boxes have no place in science or mathematics, at least not any black boxes that we create ourselves. That's my point. I shouldn't just tell you "minimise, this function, it worked" (or it didn't, who knows why). We should both be able to see exactly what that minimisation did and why it did or did not work.
I think you misread my comment. I'm agreeing with you on the importance of being able to inspect the code and I'm strongly against black boxes.
Where I don't agree with you is that open-source === free and community driven. There are a myriad of hybrid models where a for-profit company releases the code, yet doesn't accept pull requests from the community.
The all-or-nothing attitude that you just showed is actually a very good argument for those who are against open-sourcing within a company like ours. Do you really think a company will go from commercial to GPL in one step because: "freedom is not a spectrum"?