[HN Gopher] Launching Version 13.0 of Wolfram Language and Mathe...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Launching Version 13.0 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica
        
       Author : nsoonhui
       Score  : 131 points
       Date   : 2021-12-16 10:17 UTC (12 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (writings.stephenwolfram.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (writings.stephenwolfram.com)
        
       | Sporktacular wrote:
       | My PC slows down just by displaying a page that only describes
       | what Mathematica can do.
        
       | stabbles wrote:
       | https://twitter.com/hypergeometer/status/1470505437934067725
        
         | SloopJon wrote:
         | I know you're pointing out the author's concern about
         | acknowledging his LGPL library, but I otherwise would have
         | missed what is one of the cooler features in this huge post,
         | CenteredInterval.
         | 
         | Indeed, the post essentially brags about how big it is:
         | 
         | > In Version 1.0 there were a total of 554 functions
         | altogether. Yet between Version 12.0 and Version 13.0 we've now
         | added a total of 635 new functions (in addition to the 702
         | functions that have been updated and upgraded).
         | 
         | With these batteries-included languages, mastery of the
         | language really requires mastery of the library.
        
         | zamadatix wrote:
         | It's tucked in a typical "help -> about -> credits" in the app
         | just like the hundreds of other libraries. The language
         | documentation never includes documentation on how the functions
         | were built, it's for reading what things do and how to use
         | them.
        
           | fdej wrote:
           | Indeed. There's no way for users of Wolfram Cloud, for
           | example, to see that information though.
        
             | zamadatix wrote:
             | I don't use cloud so I'll take your word there is no such
             | information anywhere but the originally linked post is the
             | author saying they don't think it's used in Cloud anyways.
        
               | fdej wrote:
               | I'm the poster. I think you misunderstood the followup
               | post -- the same library is definitely used in the Cloud
               | (same as the standalone Mathematica).
        
               | zamadatix wrote:
               | Appreciate the correction, you'd be right - I mistakenly
               | read it as cloud vs local not normal vs interval.
        
       | mark_l_watson wrote:
       | I wish that I could really get into the Wolfram Language because
       | in addition to symbolic programming I really like support for
       | machine learning, semantic web, and data visualization.
       | 
       | I love using Lisp languages, I adapt to Python because I need it
       | for my career in ML/DL, and Haskell for something different.
       | 
       | I have subscribed to the Desktop Edition (better interactivity
       | that the cloud version) twice, so I have about four months of
       | writing little bits of code and experimenting. I don't mind the
       | price (I happily pay for full up LispWorks with support). It is
       | the language itself.
       | 
       | I have experimented with using WL from Common Lisp and Clojure,
       | but there is some overhead for that.
       | 
       | Anyway, WL is an amazing ecosystem. I wish I could love the
       | language.
        
       | leephillips wrote:
       | Our other giants in the history of programming language design
       | have been far too modest. Imagine how APL might have changed the
       | world if only it had been called Iverson Language. And nobody
       | would still be using Word if the Knuth Typesetting Language were
       | available.
        
       | zamadatix wrote:
       | Seems to come with a ~6% perf boost to BenchmarkReport[] vs 12.3
       | as well.
        
         | carry_bit wrote:
         | On AMD with the MKL_DEBUG_CPU_TYPE hack still in place, it's
         | about the same as 12.3 for me.
        
           | zamadatix wrote:
           | I wonder if that's the difference. I ran this on 5950X but
           | didn't know about that when testing with 12.3 but setting it
           | on 13.0 isn't changing my results. According to some
           | searching on this env var it could be because MKL 2020 Update
           | 1 and later don't require this to use the AVX2 kernels but I
           | don't have my 12.3 install anymore to verify if it was using
           | an older version.
        
             | carry_bit wrote:
             | Removing it doesn't change the results for me.
             | 
             | I have a 5950X also; what are you getting for the benchmark
             | result? I'm getting around 4.06.
        
       | timmg wrote:
       | Does anyone know how wolfram's language is implemented?
       | 
       | I think that there is a small-ish language. And then a bunch of
       | hand-coded libraries that do a lot of the heavy lifting.
       | 
       | But I'm curious what that core language is like. I assume
       | someone, somewhere has built an interpreter that is equivalent.
       | Any ideas?
        
         | wrnr wrote:
         | https://github.com/corywalker/expreduce
        
         | codekilla wrote:
         | Not sure how much detail you are looking for, but I think
         | essentially it is a term rewriting system.
        
           | timmg wrote:
           | Oh, interesting. One of the first results from Google turns
           | up this: https://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/exotic02.html
           | 
           | > The most widely used rewriting engines often sit at the
           | heart of programs and languages used for logic programming,
           | proof assistants and computer algebra systems. One of the
           | most popular of these is Mathematica and the Wolfram
           | language.
           | 
           | Thanks!
        
       | srvmshr wrote:
       | For Mathematica, the graphical outputs and the vast pallette of
       | functions is truly marvelous. IMO it feels a much superior
       | product to Maple & MATLAB. If only they could make it bit more
       | affordable to individual hobbyists. If I remember right, it is
       | $200 per year (incl. tax). That does pinch the pockets a bit,
       | specially if you are from a developing country.
       | 
       | EDIT: A thought that comes to my mind is that Jetbrains products
       | are similarly placed in pricing. But YoY costs actually go down.
       | Furthermore, you are allowed to retain the last subscribed
       | version which you paid in full. You can use the same license on
       | all your machines/VMs. This is not the case with Wolfram
       | products. The pricing stays the same if you want the point
       | updates to be fetched. You cannot use the product if your
       | subscription ends and individual licenses are limited to 1 (or
       | 2?) machines. This does hurt!
        
         | phonon wrote:
         | > You cannot use the product if your subscription ends
         | 
         | You can buy a perpetual home non-commercial license for $365.
         | 
         | https://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/pricing/home-hobby/
        
         | buescher wrote:
         | There's a free tier of Wolfram Cloud. Mathematica is also
         | bundled with the Raspberry Pi Raspbian distribution.
        
           | srvmshr wrote:
           | It is practically unusable to the point of being a joke on
           | Raspberry pi. Mathematica still takes couple of seconds on my
           | 8-core/64GB rig to compute a non-trivial expression,
           | notwithstanding any manual simplification. There is a
           | noticeable time to boot the program where you stare at the
           | Wolfram Spikey. The benchmarks are brutal no matter which
           | Raspberry pi you choose:
           | 
           | 1. (Older artucle)
           | https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=248423
           | 
           | 2. (Newer article in JP but web translation works decent):
           | https://decafish.blog.ss-blog.jp/2020-07-19
        
             | buescher wrote:
             | Yes, with a rpi you are going back 15-20 years in
             | performance. I don't know that I would call that unusable.
             | People used Mathematica on the G5 PowerPC, which was in the
             | same ballpark in the benchmarks you cite.
             | 
             | So I guess... for hobbyists, it just depends on your hobby.
        
               | kzrdude wrote:
               | I'd be curious what qemu could do for running the RPI
               | Mathematica on a regular desktop computer
        
               | srvmshr wrote:
               | I am okay with a G5-spec if everything else remained as
               | they were 20 years ago. They haven't.
               | 
               | Datasets have grown in size exponentially. You deal with
               | images which are no longer few kilobytes. Window managers
               | in the GUI have to paint over a much larger display area
               | even if you consider whitespace. To do a hobby project
               | like for e.g build a toy spam-filter or a toy classifier,
               | the prompt to execution takes over 6 minutes on a really
               | tiny model. I don't see why this hobby project angle
               | seems viable either. Hence, why I said its unusable
               | practically.
        
             | buescher wrote:
             | It's also very, very easy to run into compute limits on the
             | free tiers of Wolfram Cloud and even Wolfram Alpha.
        
           | kgwgk wrote:
           | The Wolfram engine can also be used for free:
           | https://www.wolfram.com/engine/
           | 
           | It can be used as Jupyter kernel:
           | https://github.com/WolframResearch/WolframLanguageForJupyter
        
         | pwr-electronics wrote:
         | IMO modern MATLAB with the right toolboxes is much more capable
         | than Mathematica. Pricing is similar.
        
           | adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
           | imo, the problem with Matlab is that Julia is better in
           | pretty much every way. even numpy has managed to outclass it.
        
           | 7thaccount wrote:
           | This is not my experience.
           | 
           | Mathematica has a LOT more integrated into the base product.
           | Matlab requires a toolbox for nearly everything and many
           | toolboxes cost more than a Mathematica license. I enjoy
           | Mathematica, but find Matlab to be inferior to Python
           | development and very expensive.
        
             | sgillen wrote:
             | I think Matlab is starting to realize this, at least at the
             | institutional level they are starting to offer all the
             | toolboxes for a fixed price (much much lower than buying
             | all the boxes individually)
        
             | pwr-electronics wrote:
             | > many toolboxes cost more than
             | 
             | They're all priced the same for home use.
             | 
             | https://www.mathworks.com/store/link/products/home/ML
        
           | srvmshr wrote:
           | MATLAB individual license for base product is actually lower,
           | but toolboxes can cost a fortune. Student/Home version does
           | not have several features inbuilt which have to be bought
           | separately. Also the symbolic math support is dodgy. If I had
           | to do Numpy type of operations only, I will take Numpy over
           | MATLAB because its open source and free.
        
             | sgillen wrote:
             | Symbolic math in matlab is vastly inferior to Mathematica,
             | and the deep learning and reinforcement learning toolboxes
             | are vastly inferior to the offerings in python.
             | 
             | However for control system design or digital signal
             | processing I think matlab is superior to both, I also think
             | the matlab IDE is severely underated.
             | 
             | These are just from my experiences, I'm sure each of these
             | languages have other applications where they are superior
             | to the other too.
             | 
             | I also speak with privilege as someone who has access to
             | all these packages for free so..
        
           | phkahler wrote:
           | >> IMO modern MATLAB with the right toolboxes is much more
           | capable than Mathematica.
           | 
           | ...depending what you want to do. Anything symbolic is
           | probably not a great fit for Matlab.
        
             | MisterBiggs wrote:
             | Never done symbolic math in Mathematica but I have done it
             | extensively in SymPy and Matlab. The symbolic toolbox is
             | surprisingly powerful and performant compared to SymPy and
             | I've never really been left wanting more.
        
       | nynx wrote:
       | Mathematica is amazing, but I wish it were open-source.
        
         | phkahler wrote:
         | >> Mathematica is amazing, but I wish it were open-source.
         | 
         | OSS or not, I fear for its future after Stephen Wolfram passes.
         | Hopefully he has a good succession plan that's focused on the
         | product and users rather than shareholders.
        
           | throway453sde wrote:
           | Mathematica is what it is because its design comes from a
           | single brain. It does not matter which group or an individual
           | takes over next, it will not be the same. Wish Stephen lives
           | long enough until humans have solved aging.
        
           | kgwgk wrote:
           | I imagine that the company will remain privately held and
           | will be controlled by the Wolfram Foundation or something
           | like that.
        
         | maliker wrote:
         | As another commenter pointed out they are pretty adamant about
         | not going open source [1].
         | 
         | But then later they walked it back a little and claimed they
         | are "like open source" [2]. Funny there are 12 reasons for
         | being closed source and only 6 for being "like" open source.
         | And the reasons they're like open source are pretty weak. The
         | first one (free use) has a lot of restrictions like the way
         | their cloud product locks you out of your files 60 days after
         | they're created.
         | 
         | It's cool what Wolfam has achieved, but it's hard to justify
         | going with a closed tool these days with all the interest in
         | open science and the capabilities that are now available in the
         | open source world.
         | 
         | [1] https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-
         | op... [2] https://blog.wolfram.com/2021/11/30/six-reasons-why-
         | the-wolf...
        
         | carry_bit wrote:
         | If only they had a cash cow, like how Microsoft has Windows and
         | Office, so development of the language could be subsidized.
        
           | steerablesafe wrote:
           | The main cash cow of Mathematica is the library, not
           | necessarily the language. They could certainly make the
           | language more open, while keeping the secret sauce in the
           | library. They could also open up some core parts of the
           | library too.
        
             | alisonkisk wrote:
             | Why bother? You can use open source alternatives if that's
             | all you want.
        
         | throway453sde wrote:
         | In one of the vidoe Stephen Wolfram said he had discussed with
         | RMS and was not convinced. I could not find what was the core
         | argument. I like to know what his core argument is apart from
         | making enough money to continue the work.
        
           | carry_bit wrote:
           | There's this: https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-
           | wolfram-tech-isnt-op...
        
             | daniel-thompson wrote:
             | > 9. Open source doesn't bring major tech innovation to
             | market
             | 
             | Linux kernel, LLVM, Blender, TensorFlow, Stockfish,
             | Firefox, etc etc
        
               | mhh__ wrote:
               | Statements like this are always biased by the perception
               | of the writer i.e. you're walking into a no true scotsman
               | here unless Wolfram is literally just too ignorant to
               | remember that his business is likely reliant in some way
               | upon open source.
        
             | analog31 wrote:
             | It'd be interesting to analyze how the Python ecosystem
             | stacks up against the points made in this blog. Naturally I
             | don't have an insider's appreciation for what it takes to
             | develop and maintain a language, so I can't really answer
             | them myself.
        
               | throwaway984393 wrote:
               | Python is a good example of how open source can become
               | quite problematic. A lot of the Python ecosystem,
               | including the packages, is a confusing and slightly
               | broken jumble. The lack of leadership/organization from
               | the core group has led to problems.
               | 
               | But what he's missing in his points is that Mathematica
               | is led by a company! _They_ get to design it, _they_ get
               | to organize it, so _they_ have full control of it still.
               | Look at Terraform: it 's horrible usability-wise and has
               | tons of limitations. If it was open source, it would have
               | had auto-import from day one, adding a version or
               | depends_on to modules would've happened from day one, and
               | something like CDK probably would have already been built
               | in, so Pulumi probably wouldn't exist either. But since
               | Hashicorp controls it, it only works the way they want,
               | in spite of open source.
               | 
               | As long as Stephen's company is developing Mathematica,
               | they can maintain full control (of their distribution of
               | it), and it's extremely unlikely for any fork to be
               | successful.
        
               | analog31 wrote:
               | That's a valid point, something I've read a lot about.
               | I'm a "scientific" programmer, so my usage is similar to
               | how I used Mathematica (20+ years ago), at my desk or in
               | the lab. I keep wondering to myself: Is Python really
               | such a mess? Are the problems related to use cases that
               | don't apply to me?
               | 
               | I also wonder (could download the trial version and find
               | out) how Mathematica would be for things like hardware
               | testing and lab automation. That's more of a side issue
               | than directly related to the points of the blog post.
               | 
               | But you're probably right about trying to fork
               | Mathematica. Python may owe its success to forking
               | _ideas_ from Mathematica, Matlab, etc., without vying
               | head to head with the mother ship.
               | 
               | Being a company also has its drawbacks, such as having to
               | invest a certain amount of effort into marketing-driven
               | development such as trying to keep people buying
               | upgrades. But maybe a company with a BDFL at the top of
               | it can avoid that issue.
        
               | mhh__ wrote:
               | Python isn't really a mess (certainly less messy than
               | MATLAB IMO) but the issue is that many practitioners are
               | basically thrown at the language without any real caution
               | or care.
               | 
               | A modern python (e.g. anaconda?) distribution is a pretty
               | formidable tool (for some things I'd definitely take
               | Mathematica any day, but I don't really code in
               | mathematica vs. sketch) - the people using that
               | distribution however may also not know anything about
               | good practice. Python unfortunately is far too allowing
               | of this, too, so some scripts are a genuinely hell. I'm a
               | physics student currently working as a programmer, 2/5
               | lines of code I see in my department would be enough to
               | request changes from a patch. I daydream about teaching
               | them but that's never going to happen.
               | 
               | At work we actually developed a functional language (nee
               | DSL) specifically to funnel people down exactly the
               | places we want.
        
               | cycomanic wrote:
               | If you think the python ecosystem is a mess I trust you
               | have never used matlab and its toolboxes.
               | 
               | Also in the context of numerical/scientific programming I
               | don't understand what is the issue with the packaging
               | system. It's been working fine for myself and many others
               | I know of.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | n-e-w wrote:
       | I've enjoyed developing in the language professionally for many
       | years. Truly, few things allow as rapid prototyping with such
       | efficacy for so few lines across so many domains in a unified
       | interface. There are some brilliantly innovative things across
       | the language and, once you really get into the weeds of how to
       | write efficient functional code, some of the things you can do
       | are incredible.
       | 
       | Two things, though. Firstly, they are very stubborn on condoning
       | a community to coalesce around the language other than through
       | 'official' Wolfram channels. This comes from the big man himself,
       | no doubt. As much as they want to drive adoption by coming up
       | with (what they think are) "cool" sounding initiatives, they will
       | never get devs to break from their core workflows and tools to do
       | things the Wolfram way. There is no first-class support for
       | daily-driver editing (vscode, emacs etc etc) for large-scale
       | projects (other than an ancient eclipse package). Brenton Bostick
       | at Wolfram has done some truly first class work in closing this
       | gap though.
       | 
       | Secondly, this is the first major release that is a bit 'ho-hum'
       | for a while. And it's reflective of the fact that whatever
       | Stephen's pet interests are at a particular point in time will
       | get attention in a release. For example, V11 was huge on Machine
       | Learning and AI...now it barely gets a mention or extra
       | development. Because SW is so focused on his Physics Project,
       | this will likley be the case for a while.
       | 
       | To anyone thinking about using the language -- dive in. It's
       | brilliant and expressive and _fun_. It 's satisfying. You can do
       | cool stuff. It just becomes very difficult when you want to scale
       | it.
       | 
       | Anyone from WRI reading this: please, please, please let the
       | community develop organically and support the toolchain everyone
       | has wanted for so long. Or don't. But you need us more than we
       | need you. Oh, and simplify the product line -- what a nightmare
       | for newcomers to navigate. :-)
        
         | disentanglement wrote:
         | Perhaps I can add a counterpoint before anybody gets too
         | excited and spends too much money on a tool they might not
         | enjoy.
         | 
         | Having used Mathematica quite a bit for doing symbolic
         | computation, my opinion on it is pretty much opposite to yours.
         | While the extensive standard library is certainly nice, I think
         | that the programming language used to access it is one of the
         | worst programming languages in the world - certainly the worst
         | I have ever used. I have never seen any other programming
         | language where the basic scoping and evaluation rules are so
         | badly designed and error-prone as in Mathematica.
        
           | ModernMech wrote:
           | Can you elaborate as to what you dislike about scoping and
           | eval rules? Asking as a language designer.
        
             | disentanglement wrote:
             | The main issue with the evaluation rules is that
             | Mathematica doesn't distinguish between creating a symbolic
             | expression and evaluating code. That is if I type
             | f[x]
             | 
             | and the function `f` is not defined, Mathematica will not
             | give me an error but instead just assume that I meant to
             | create a symbolic expression. If you know some Lisp, just
             | imagine that everything came with an implicit `quote` which
             | would automatically get invoked whenever a unbound variable
             | or function would we encountered.
             | 
             | That issue alone has caused me so many errors simply from
             | mistyping some function or variable name. For simple
             | expressions, such bugs are pretty obvious to spot but if
             | the same occurs deep inside a chain of function calls, this
             | often lead to completely wrong results because the bug got
             | masked by some other manipulations I did on the result of
             | the function call.
             | 
             | Of course, there are tons of hacks and ad-hoc workarounds
             | in Mathematica to get around this (imho fundamentally
             | broken) behaviour to the tune of "just stick another
             | `Evaluate` here" or "just change the function definition
             | from `g[x_]` to `g[x_?NumericQ]` to call the function only
             | when the argument is numeric and otherwise leave it
             | unevaluated".
             | 
             | The situation with the scoping rules is not much better.
             | Consider for instance the following code:                 y
             | = 1;       expression = Module[{y},1+y]; (* Module creates
             | a new scope in which y is unbound *)
             | 
             | Can you guess what happens if I print out `expression` now?
             | Print[expression]       1+y$4066
             | 
             | Yes, Mathematica has just renamed our variable. If now we
             | wanted to set `y` in our expression to some concrete value,
             | of course the obvious thing to try doesn't work, but just
             | gives me some bullshit:
             | Print[ReplaceAll[expression, y->10]]       10+y$4066
             | 
             | These are all only some simple examples of why doing any
             | kind of metaprogramming in Mathematica just sucks.
        
               | nextaccountic wrote:
               | > and the function `f` is not defined, Mathematica will
               | not give me an error but instead just assume that I meant
               | to create a symbolic expression.
               | 
               | I've dreamed about creating a language like this, but had
               | to give up because it makes diagnostics impossible in
               | case o typos and things like that..
               | 
               | My best bet now is to have some quote syntax to make a
               | symbol stand for an abstract symbol, like
               | 
               | 1 + x -- this sums 1 with x, and errors if x is unbound
               | 
               | 1 + 'x -- this is an abstract expression, doesn't care if
               | x is bound or not
               | 
               | Like lisp, except with some first class support to things
               | like derive(1 + 'x, 'x), and, well, every operator needs
               | to respect quoted symbols.. even if + were a user-defined
               | operator or function, 1 + 'x needs to return (the AST) 1
               | + 'x. I suppose this is the same as Mathematica, except
               | that Mathematica doesn't need quoting
        
             | jjoonathan wrote:
             | Global scope (really global -- even between windows) is the
             | default and the encapsulation tools are not particularly
             | easy or convenient to use and not heavily promoted in the
             | example material.
             | 
             | This leads to a dynamic where anyone without the CS
             | background to recognize the foot-gun and the discipline to
             | disarm it winds up with awful spaghetti code and the all-
             | to-familiar consequences: a big blob of unmaintainable
             | mystery code that becomes more and more difficult to modify
             | until all project time is spent merely keeping it working
             | rather than improving upon it.
             | 
             | We might laugh about this kind of newbie mistake here on
             | HN, but even extremely intelligent people can't be experts
             | at everything and the sheer number of physicist-hours and
             | mathematician-hours I've seen needlessly flushed down this
             | particular toilet is really quite unfortunate.
        
               | pfortuny wrote:
               | Thanks for this comment. Have the same experience at a
               | Maths Department.
               | 
               | Each run of some specific code is "ouch, we must try and
               | see when we have the time to understand how it works and
               | how each error is handled." Just because it is soooo
               | difficult to properly write a module.
        
         | ezequiel-garzon wrote:
         | "I've enjoyed developing in the language professionally for
         | many years."
         | 
         | And I've enjoyed your wonderful post, thank you. HN can be
         | truly amazing. I know, I know, upvotes are for that... 'Tis the
         | season, or something.
        
         | leephillips wrote:
         | I looked all over their website, but could't find a link to
         | download the source for the Wolfram Language so I can compile
         | it. Do you have a link?
        
           | the-dude wrote:
           | Aren't you already _perfectly_ aware this is not open source?
           | From your profile I must assume you are.
        
             | leephillips wrote:
             | Why do you say that?
        
               | the-dude wrote:
               | Because apparently you are writing a book about Julia. I
               | assume people who write books about a language which are
               | also in vogue in the scientific community, they are aware
               | of the eco-system of said community. Mathematica is not
               | exactly a new kid on the block.
               | 
               | Why don't you answer the question?
        
               | leephillips wrote:
               | The answer is that I did not know, and that's why I
               | asked. Mathematica is not a big part of the scientific
               | research world as far as I'm aware. I don't know anyone
               | who uses it in physics research, for example. The last
               | time I played around with Mathematica was in graduate
               | school before Linux existed, when closed source and
               | proprietary solutions were the norm. Back then I don't
               | think there was anything like the Wolfram Language
               | independent of the Mathematica product. So when I heard
               | that this language now existed, I wondered if it was open
               | and, therefore, something that might be interesting to
               | use in research. From your tone I suspect that you won't
               | believe any of this. I'll leave it up to your fevered
               | imagination to divine how much I care about that.
        
               | carry_bit wrote:
               | The "Wolfram Language" name is essentially just a
               | rebranding of Mathematica to highlight the fact that it
               | does way more than just math now.
        
           | trymas wrote:
           | Someone will correct me if I am wrong, but Wolfram products
           | are proprietary (read - you need to buy the license or
           | subscribe to it), just like MATLAB.
        
             | leephillips wrote:
             | If it's not open source then it's a non-starter, it doesn't
             | matter how cool it is. This is not an ideological free
             | software stance, it's a recognition that science has
             | embraced the utility of open source tools and rejected
             | black boxes. It's essential for reproducibility and
             | transparency in research. It's no longer enough to provide
             | your code in a paper supplement or on GitHub; the entire
             | chain must be available for inspection, including the
             | language itself.
             | 
             | EDIT: One common exception to this principle is the use of
             | proprietary C or Fortran compilers for high performance.
        
               | Jeff_Brown wrote:
               | Does this mean SAS will finally die?
        
               | kzrdude wrote:
               | They tried to get it out for freeon the raspi but I guess
               | the uptake was really quite low. Either way the program
               | for that has basically ended.
               | https://www.wolfram.com/raspberry-pi/
        
               | leephillips wrote:
               | I don't see any source there. Was is open source or just
               | beer-free?
        
               | Smaug123 wrote:
               | It is not and has never been open-source. In fact they
               | wrote https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-
               | tech-isnt-op... .
        
               | agentdrek wrote:
               | I'm aghast at this point:
               | https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-
               | isnt-op...
               | 
               | The blog post was probably literally written in and
               | hosted entirely on open source software which were highly
               | innovative at their earlier stages and continue to be
               | highly innovative. This is a very self-serving
               | presentation of an idea. Also, I officially dislike the
               | word innovation.
        
               | throway453sde wrote:
               | Its a good thing that it did not take off. Using
               | something for free without source code is the bad thing
               | that could happen to pi wrt to its mission.
        
               | carry_bit wrote:
               | The Pi is built on a foundation of binary blobs. As I
               | read it, https://www.raspberrypi.org/about/ is a lot more
               | focused on free-as-beer than free-as-speech.
        
               | kzrdude wrote:
               | They are giving a lot, I respect them a lot for that.
               | They are practical about it too, of course, compromises
               | have to be made everywhere.
        
         | agambrahma wrote:
         | I recently got into it and it is exhilarating.
         | 
         | There's so much to it that it's easy to get lost. I don't even
         | care for the "deep math" parts of it, it has _so many_ APIs for
         | real-world data that "plain old exploration" is super-fun with
         | it.
         | 
         | It'll also be great for anyone looking for "creative coding"
         | (typically Processing.js etc is used for this), since the
         | Graphics abilities are so quick and easy.
         | 
         | It has "a different shape" w.r.t. the languages and tools that
         | are commonly used for programming, but it is a beast.
         | 
         | Highly recommend to anyone curious.
         | 
         | Also, https://www.wolfram.com/language/elementary-
         | introduction/2nd... (free to read online, though I read it on
         | paper) was helpful to me, browse through it to get a feel for
         | what it's like to use it.
        
         | carry_bit wrote:
         | I've heard they're working on creating an uncurated paclet
         | repository, and the new paclet tools would appear to be the
         | first step of that. Once that is complete we should finally
         | have something similar npm.
        
       | [deleted]
        
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