Back to News
Advertisement
Advertisement

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

62% Positive

Analyzed from 834 words in the discussion.

Trending Topics

#mathematica#wolfram#assistant#years#level#sense#code#using#used#problem

Discussion (23 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

Lucasoatoabout 3 hours ago
I’ve used Mathematica at university, it’s so great! Creating fractals, animations and so on is so easy and intuitive.

The problem though is that Wolfram is a walled garden. When you think about integrating it in an enterprise environment, you get hit by such high costs, it stops making sense. Imagine if they open sourced it, I feel like their products have so much utility, buried deep down Wolfram ecosystem and conventions.

brudgers23 minutes ago
Wolfram is $4000/seat for a perpetual commercial license with support. [1] $4000 will only buy a middling Mac Tool tool chest…and not the tools to put in it.

[1] a personal perpetual license is only $400.

orochimaaruabout 2 hours ago
It doesn't make sense even for academia. Reproducibility is an issue and as we've seen with recent fraudulent claims in major publications - it's what is going to be used for verification of research.

Many years back while in grad school I could not reproduce a result from a paper. Thankfully they had provided the data as public but not the code. I emailed the authors and got some matlab code back. My university didn't have a matlab subscription. Octave saved me there since the syntax is similar.

But with something like mathematica and the price of it you will never be able to have a wide verification of the result if the software is not free.

Also, a lot of things in industry gain traction first in academia (especially math tools). So unless academic traction is dealt with mathematica's headway in industry will remain limited. They are still a profitable company. So I'm guessing there are deep pocketed clients who purchase the tooling.

kridsdale129 minutes ago
The situation you’re describing is probably why Python is the defacto language of Machine Learning to this day.
coliveiraabout 1 hour ago
Mathematica has a lot of clients in math and engineering. Traditionally these clients are not so concerned about software engineering issues you mention. What Mathematica offers also makes sense for small firms with a few engineers, because they can leverage their vast amount of ready to use functions and libraries. But I agree that for medium to large size companies it stops making sense.
Joel_Mckayabout 2 hours ago
Wolfram did have Visual Studio API integration at one point, and it was useful reducing algorithmic symbolic design complexity. However, it was mostly the academically controversial assumptions that Mathematica makes that undermined its credibility in many faculties.

For example, when digging into GNU Octave you will find many of its libraries were built on peer reviewed legacy code provably reproducible with prior aerospace published works.

The problem with closed source academic programs isn't features or even quality, but rather one of traceable Metrology and scientific rigor. =3

breezybottomabout 1 hour ago
Most scientific fields have no problem using SAS or STATA or other black box code. I don't think that explains Mathematica's problems.
Joel_Mckayabout 1 hour ago
Indeed, likely negatively correlated with other behavioral phenomena =3

https://www.statista.com/chart/4111/do-europeans-wash-their-...

coliveiraabout 1 hour ago
I'm aways surprised that there's no open source language that provides everything you get with Wolfram language. For example, the level of pattern matching you can use when defining functions, as well as the high level of functional composition. It is like having a mix of APL, Lisp, and Prolog that is very productive to use.
TheRealPomax36 minutes ago
IT doesn't even need to be open source, a walled garden that you can afford is perfectly fine. Someone's going to find the cracks in the wall anyway.

But a walled garden that costs $400 for personal use (we're ignoring yearly licensing, because f that noise) is utter nonsense, and the clearest sign you have no idea how to sell and then upsell products to users over the course of several years.

prenx4x19 minutes ago
Hissab - https://hissab.io is a Free and opensource alternative to Wolfram
stblackabout 3 hours ago
I'm a huge fan of Mathematica; I've been a subscriber for many years. There's much to love about the product, but its AI assistant isn't among them.

Claude Caude is much better at Mathematica than Wolfram's own AI assistant. I think they flat-out acknowledge the very limited abilities of Mathematica's AI assistant in this version 15 announcement.

The Wolfram AI assistant is so bad I unsubscribed from it. By the sounds of it, a basic AI assistant is offered included with subscriptions now. I feel it's borderline criminal they were charging for their hallucinatory AI assistant in the past.

raincoleabout 2 hours ago
Honestly I've found even Gemini Flash is better than Wolfram assistant...

But that's fine. Mathematica client supports openrouter as LLM provider anyway so we can use whatever we want.

a-dub41 minutes ago
symbolic music features are interesting! they should add chroma!
sbrother7 minutes ago
I saw those and got excited; I've been using Mathematica for decades and do a lot of work with symbolic music.

Unfortunately they are extremely surface level in this release. It looks like there isn't even any ability to load/export MusicXML, kind of weird low level primitives and zero interesting higher level functions. Hopefully they keep iterating on it but I don't think it'll be useful for my workflow right now.

SilverElfinabout 1 hour ago
Does anyone use this outside of college classes? It looks so great in these demos but I never hear of companies using it.
mackeyeabout 1 hour ago
it has the nicest calculator syntax (imho) among the tools i've tried (python/julia/array langs/matlab/etc...) with extensive docs for each function and a nice notebook interface, but i've never written a program in it that was longer than one expression.
afolkestabout 1 hour ago
Not industry, but it's pretty popular among theoretical physics researchers.
jjthebluntabout 1 hour ago
I had it in an engineering inner sanctum of Apple. had used it since it came out in 1988 on campus in Illinois, and folks in Apple definitely knew it. Not sure who all was doing what with it.
Grosvenor36 minutes ago
Steve Jobs and Stephen Wolfram were friends for years. Mathematica shipped preinstalled on early NeXT systems.

SJ recommended some of the UI bits of the notebook. Particularly the separators between cells.

markgall44 minutes ago
Still nowadays? My impression is that in (pure) math it's lost most of its market share in the last few years. But maybe that's only in my circles.
ahnick41 minutes ago
what do you or others use instead?
Vasloabout 1 hour ago
I remember using it in my college days in the 90s.

People joining my company from academia usually know Mathematica along with Python or R.

When we tell them we don’t use Mathematica they are sometimes initially concerned. They are typically quite opinionated and I have yet to hear an employee complain about no longer having access to Mathematica. Or SPSS, SAS, or MiniTab for that matter.