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New version of Mathematica released

blog.wolfram.com

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Re: New version of Mathematica released

#31

Post by steve19 »

stevenbedrick wrote: post #24
steve19 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is SPSS any good? I have used R for projects, but quite a few researchers I know use SPSS.

SPSS is quite good, for certain things. A lot of researchers use it because little-to-no programming is required, and you can interact with it in an entirely GUI-way- if you can use Excel, you can use SPSS. It makes it easy to set up certain analyses, and gives lots of output... and there's where my concerns about it come up. It's easy to fall into a false sense of security with it, and to end up with statistics that…

Thanks.

Re: New version of Mathematica released

#32

Post by sciboy »

wwortiz wrote: post #23
sciboy wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have used R/ggplot for a long time now, and it's exceedingly difficult to produce beautiful visualizations. The only thing that makes tufte-quality visualizations in my experience is hand-building your graphs in tikz. The graphs you linked to are hideous from an aesthetics point of view; font's are ugly, data:ink ratio far too low, color choices poor etc.

Especially when you have such pretty defaults in things like Matlab and Mathematica. Matplotlib ( http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/ ) is actually the best opensource library for creating great looking graphs that I have come across, and is comparable to Matlab and Mathematica.

I've looked at matplotlib but still think it's ugly by default.

Compare to:

http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/weather-stations-data/

http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/rna-codons-table/

The beauty of tex font's + vector graphics is impressive. Try zooming in on the sparklines in the first example

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