[HN Gopher] Mathics: A free, open-source alternative to Mathematica
___________________________________________________________________
Mathics: A free, open-source alternative to Mathematica
Author : memorable
Score : 475 points
Date : 2022-11-05 03:59 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mathics.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (mathics.org)
| okasaki wrote:
| This seems to be powered mostly by Python libraries, but they
| made a custom language that looks like Mathematica. Why not just
| use Python?
| kragen wrote:
| Surprisingly, it seems to have survived over a year without being
| taken offline by baseless DMCA threats.
| greenyoda wrote:
| It seems to have been around much longer than that. It was
| first posted to HN ten years ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4066826
| msteffen wrote:
| Is this in any way related to https://www.sagemath.org/?
| gcanyon wrote:
| The announcement years back suggested it supported sage at
| least https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4066826
| el_sinchi wrote:
| unlikely, they seem to be separate efforts
| friend_and_foe wrote:
| Here's a great one for Android as well.
|
| https://github.com/mkulesh/microMathematics
|
| These guys should collaborate.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Thank you for this. It is not comparable to the program in the
| OP, but it seems a terrific Android app nonetheless. And it's
| available on Fdroid too.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Mathics - A free, light-weight alternative to Mathematica_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19851934 - May 2019 (83
| comments)
|
| _Mathics: A free, light-weight alternative to Mathematica_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11459186 - April 2016 (73
| comments)
|
| _Mathics - A free, light-weight alternative to Mathematica_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5196551 - Feb 2013 (86
| comments)
|
| _Mathics - A free, light-weight alternative to Mathematica with
| support for Sage_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4066826
| - June 2012 (57 comments)
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Every time someone makes a "free mathematica", my first question
| is "can I write, and see, maths as actual maths instead of as
| programming statement?" and every time so far the answer has been
| "no". So... can I write, and see, maths as actual maths?
| loa_in_ wrote:
| A simplistic but nice application for Android I found looking
| for this after reading parent's comment.
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=us.mathlab.and...
| (Adware/Non-free/closed source)
| sterlind wrote:
| in Mathematica at least, you can use TraditionalForm to format
| your equations like maths. and what's more, you can edit things
| in that form without dropping out of it. you can also make
| palettes for commonly used symbols and such. it's not a magic
| blackboard, but with the symbolic nature of Mathematica and the
| rendering, it's kinda close.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Indeed, so does this have that?
| User23 wrote:
| What is "actual maths?"
| Ciantic wrote:
| Desmos has open source library called MathQuill, which converts
| typed chars to mathematical representation similar to
| Mathematica. Sure there is some "programming statements" with
| some (La)TeX like syntax there, but so does Mathematica too.
|
| [1]: http://mathquill.com/
| navane wrote:
| The industry standard (in my industry) software to do that is
| MathCad, of which version 15 is the peak release. Although not
| maintained anymore, it is still used a lot today. Because it is
| not maintained anymore, it doesn't change and has been the same
| for the past ~15 years.
|
| A free, still maintained, alternative of that is
| smathhttps://en.smath.com/view/SMathStudio/summary, which also
| has a cloud option.
| phkahler wrote:
| Wait, Mathcad is unmaintained? What happened?
| theFco wrote:
| It became Mathcad Prime that is still maintained and had a
| release this year.
| data_maan wrote:
| Which is your industry, if you don't mind me asking?
| navane wrote:
| Civil engineering
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| In that space, https://blockpad.net/ is interesting also
| jopsen wrote:
| Oh, I miss MathCad, I wish we had a decent FOSS clone.
| tikej wrote:
| I find Julia's Pluto to be reasonably close alternative.
|
| Of course it lacks many features, but plugins systems and
| overall architecture gives hope for possible extension to
| include many of the desired features.
| hmottestad wrote:
| I agree. Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha are amazing because of
| how close they get to maths as it is taught in school, uni and
| through books.
|
| There are many other ways of working with maths. Graphing
| calculators are very common, and some models even have proper
| algebra support. There are also the likes of Matlab, R, Python
| + numpy, and obviously the addition of Jupyter notebooks.
|
| "Mathematica(r)-compatible syntax and functions" seems to be
| the main selling point of Mathics. I presume that this means
| that I can copy-paste Mathematica examples I find online or
| that are shared with my by someone else.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| > So... can I write, and see, maths as actual maths?
|
| Sorry to be nitpicking, but it seems you conflate "actual
| maths" with "maths notation we're accustomed to (since the 19
| century)".
|
| As to what "actual maths" really is, it's an extremely
| interesting question that belongs to the philosophy of
| mathematics (mostly).
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| That's not a conflation, that is using the word "actual"
| correctly.
|
| Amusingly, the one thing that the word "actual" does _not_
| permit is leading the conversation to that "extremely
| interesting question": the word "actual" forces an
| interlocutor to consider only those contexts in which the
| thing in question is a real, existing thing. "Actual" is a
| no-hypotheticals-or-philosophical-ponderings zone =)
|
| In this case, that real thing would be modern maths
| notations. So this is kind of artificial nitpicking: English
| is not a zero-context language, you are still required and
| expected to understand the context words are used in based on
| understanding that they wouldn't make a lot of sense in other
| -even related- contexts.
|
| Of course, if I'd been glib and said this:
|
| > So... can I write, and see, maths?
|
| Then the insinuation that maths and programming are mutually
| exclusive concepts should definitely lead to a philosophical
| discussion.
| aflag wrote:
| That's indeed a bit of a nitpick. If you're working with
| maths, going back to your notes and reading them is really
| important. If your notes look like Sum(k,math.inf, (math.pi
| _pow(sqrt(x),k))_...)), it 's really not great. So, while
| you're correct that it's just notation, the issue remains
| that it's much harder to read maths in ascii.
| davnn wrote:
| I understand the wish, and Mathematica does a pretty great job
| of making the mathematical notation less ambiguous, but I'm
| surprised that this would be your highest priority. Do you
| actually enjoy _writing_ in math notation?
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Who said it was my highest priority? Obviously having a
| solver is the highest priority, but it turns out that if you
| purport to have made a mathematica competitor, that was the
| baseline. If you don't have that, you have nothing. So the
| question is never "can it do what it needs to", it's always
| "can it do the things which keep me using Mathematica,
| instead of Sage, like letting me compose notebooks that
| contain, and show, actual maths?"
|
| And yes, I enjoy writing in math notation because it's an
| immediately understandable notation compared to 500 character
| programming statement.
| dagw wrote:
| In many cases yes. Especially non-programmers really like
| that the equation they type into their software looks exactly
| the the equation in the paper they are copying it from.
| laingc wrote:
| If you're a working mathematician, it's the only way you
| think.
| esperent wrote:
| If you are the X then you must do/be Y is called
| gatekeeping.
|
| And of course this is not true.
|
| I know mathematicians who work almost exclusively on a
| computer, and others who have an old dusty computer from 20
| years ago in the corner of their office that they barely
| touch. Most are somewhere in between.
| qubex wrote:
| Mathematics is one of the oldest disciplines in the
| world. Grumbling about the legacy of its ancient history
| as 'gatekeeping' is puerile.
| Beldin wrote:
| This started worth talking about notation. Notation of
| mathematics has changed significantly over time -
| Newton's Principae is not readable without accounting for
| changes. In the history of maths, that is a fairly recent
| work.
| qubex wrote:
| I actually agree with your premise: mathematics and it's
| notations (plural) are ancient. The current notations are
| those that were found to be most convenient by centuries
| of practice by expert practitioners.
| tikej wrote:
| This is of course very true but doesn't take into account
| invention of computer that is relatively recent.
|
| Since it in principle never makes mistakes (in practice
| there are of course bugs, but they are usually different
| in nature than human errors) it changes what is possible
| and most convenient. You no longer have to optimise for
| simplicity as heavily for example. On the other hand
| computers basically can't deal with ambiguity, so the
| rules and statements have to be stated very simply and
| clearly.
|
| EDIT: One example that comes to mind are indexes in
| functions. Usually they are just additional arguments
| that are different somehow from the "main" arguments, for
| example often being non-negative integers. For humans it
| makes it easier to think and operate about indices
| separately from the rest of arguments. But for the
| computer it's all the same, as all arguments are treated
| just as argument, (of course it depends on the
| implementation etc) and there is no need to treat them
| separately, since every argument is "special".
|
| I believe computers can change the landscape of what's
| best notation. This is an interesting, interdisciplinary
| topic to explore.
| Qem wrote:
| I think APL was originally created as a fix to this
| problem. A completely revamped math notation to make it
| more fit to computers as a medium, instead of pen and
| paper.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| If it was created thus then it could hardly be considered
| successful. To all but the dedicated and obsessive
| cognoscenti APL is nothing but gobbledygook.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| > If you are the X then you must do/be Y is called
| gatekeeping.
|
| Let's be precise here: the parent hasn't used "must"
| here, just stated their observation. It's possible that
| many if not most mathematicians work this way, but it's
| not definitely the only one, and it doesn't mean it can't
| be changed. Actually, there is a lot of work being done
| on theorem provers, for example.
| traverseda wrote:
| If you are a python programmer you must program in
| python.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Yes. I'm sorry but how is this not obvious? Do you enjoy
| hand-writing code on paper?
|
| The natural medium for math is on whiteboards and paper. A
| computer algebra system like Mathematica is useful, but it
| augments what is traditionally a paper-and-pencil activity.
| It makes sense that the standard notation for math is
| something that is amenable to physical tools.
|
| And it makes sense that the computer tools to assist
| mathematicians should more closely match this standard
| notation.
| soegaard wrote:
| > my first question is "can I write, and see, maths as actual
| maths instead of as programming statement?"
|
| What would that look like?
|
| Do you have a hypothetical example?
| dagw wrote:
| I suspect they mean they want something like this:
| https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ymrym.png
|
| As opposed to something like def f(x,k) =
| Sum(k,math.inf,
| (math.pi*pow(sqrt(x),k))*sin(2*theta*(sqrt(...
| krsrhe wrote:
| asoneth wrote:
| Reading these replies, it's surprising to me how many people
| think that constraining writing a linear sequence of fixed
| characters is somehow natural as opposed to a simplification
| made for cost and technical reasons by Gutenberg, typewriters,
| keyboards, and ASCII.
|
| Writing is more than this. Writers can arrange characters in 2d
| space to convey semantic relationships in equations or among
| words. You can have multiple degrees of emphasis and italics.
| You can get a sense of which parts of the equation or prose
| were written quickly and which were written slowly and
| carefully. Often it conveys a bit of personality. You can even
| include small drawings or sketches embedded within the text
| like Gallelo's illustration of Saturn's rings.
|
| I get that we have to strip out this kind of nuance for
| technical reasons, but claiming that writing ought to be
| constrained to only what can be represented in plain text feels
| like claiming that painting should be constrained to only what
| can be represented in a bitmap.
| User23 wrote:
| I strongly agree that representing multidimensional
| structures with one dimensional strings is suboptimal.
|
| On the computing side I see this as an editor problem. It's
| not hard to conceptualize some multidimensional editor, but
| evidently it is hard to build one that will overtake the
| traditional text editors and their not particularly more
| advanced IDE cousins.
|
| The closest such thing I've personally used was HyperCard. I
| think that for real progress in this area we'll have to
| abandon the desire to keep editor and language separated.
| traverseda wrote:
| I have adhd, and personally I find it a lot easier to follow
| through "math" when it's step by step. When I can say "first
| this happens, than this". I'm sure part of it is a don't have
| a great toolbox to break problems down, but personally what
| you're describing sounds horrible. Like trying to read a book
| out of order.
| larryliu wrote:
| what about recognizing handwritten math?
| https://mathpix.com/handwriting-recognition
| lokedhs wrote:
| I'm not sure you'd want to write maths that way. Every WYSIWYG
| equation editor I've used are very annoying to work with.
|
| Displaying equations is a different thing and it's supported by
| many tools. Maxima for example has wxMaxima:
| https://sourceforge.net/projects/wxmaxima/
|
| I've also been working on a different UI for Maxima:
| https://peertube.functional.cafe/w/qnx1onPEx9LCtDP3wFqjWz
| blablabla123 wrote:
| Also the actual value of Mathematica or Maple seems to me how
| good solvers are. E.g. when it comes to Integrals or just
| solving a non-linear equation. Also most common tasks work
| good enough. A good/fast UI is also important (like for
| Maxima, although I miss modern convenience a bit)
| isitmadeofglass wrote:
| > I'm not sure you'd want to write maths that way. Every
| WYSIWYG equation editor I've used are very annoying to work
| with.
|
| Try Marhematica and you'd change your mind. Yes every other
| tool does it poorly, but Mathematica does it right. It's
| fantastic and you miss it everywhere else when you have to
| leave the Mathematica eco system.
| richardw wrote:
| I'd guess the end state is: tablet, stylus and convert
| scrawls into print-worthy output. Many pitfalls along the way
| I'm sure but nothing will beat just drawing what you mean.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Surprised nobody has made an app that lets you photograph/cut
| & paste formulae from books or web pages, or just write with
| a stylus. It's the layout with keyboard and mouse that's the
| stumbling block. There's lots of good options for symbolic
| logic, numeric analysis etc.
| dagw wrote:
| There have been lots of apps that have tried to convert
| hand written math on a tablet. I've personally tried at
| least 4 or 5 over the last decade or so. None of the really
| manage to pull it off successfully for anything beyond the
| most trivial examples.
| munch117 wrote:
| You underestimate how hard the problem is. Things that in
| other fields would be minor typographical differences are
| often semantically meaningful in traditional math notation.
| Formula OCR would need to distinguish chi from x, lowercase
| delta from o with an overbar, a dot-product dot from a dot
| intended as multiplication, parentheses from brackets, v
| from the or sign. It needs to be able to determine whether
| your fraction "a / b / c" (by / I mean horizontal lines)
| was intended as "a / (b / c)" or "(a / b) / c" from the
| size of your letters, or from the relative widths of the
| fraction lines.
|
| Of course, anything a human can do, ML can learn to do
| eventually. Which invites the question: is reading
| arbitrary hand-written math actually something any human
| can do?
| shashasha2 wrote:
| Microsoft Math Solver does a good job at scanning hand
| drawn equations. Graph and solve simple polynoms
| hilbert42 wrote:
| It seems to me that few would underestimate how hard the
| problem is as the difficulty would be obvious to those
| who develop such software.
|
| There are at least two issues here, the first is that
| there isn't any agreed typographical standard that would
| make OCR more reliable, and second, there's no consistent
| or uniform way OCR algorithms are applied. To use your
| example, the OCR software ought to be able to recognize
| 'a dot-product dot from a dot intended as multiplication'
| from its useage context, and where ambiguities or doubts
| exist the item or aspect of the converted text should be
| flagged and dropped into an editor that would provide
| easy access to a choice of selectable options to choose
| from.
|
| In the absence of accurate AI/ML, having ready access to
| a flexible mathematically-aware editor so as humans can
| easily make corrections seems an absolute necessity
| (especially so when OCRed text originates from source
| material that has not been typeset with OCR in mind).
|
| It seems odd that mathematicians and programmers haven't
| yet agreed on standards and protocols around the OCR of
| mathematical formulae given that the problem has been
| with us since the outset OCR.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| > Surprised nobody has made an app that lets you
| photograph/cut & paste formulae from books or web pages, or
| just write with a stylus...
|
| https://mathpix.com/
|
| I can't vouch for it, but it seems to be trying to do that.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| Mathematica had a really nice way of entering equations, once
| you learned the shortcuts. It's so much nicer to see
| fractions, matrices and integrals in proper notation, rather
| than an endless sea of parenthesis.
|
| Eg. when you enter a rotation matrix, it's obvious when you
| make a mistake when you use the graphical editor in
| Mathematica. It takes a lot more effort to check if
| ((1,0,0),(0, sin(2 _pi_ t),cos(2 _pi_ t)),(0, cos(2 _pi_
| t),-sin(2 _pi_ t))) is correct.
| smithmayowa wrote:
| This, so much this, writting nested equations are hell in
| python and other mathematica alternatives but they are so
| easy in mathematica.
| The_suffocated wrote:
| What is a nested equation?
| isitmadeofglass wrote:
| Nesting is the concept of having a thing under another
| thing. 1+2 will be referred to as a mathematical equation
| and 1+((((a-b)/3+2/87)-6) _23) will be referred to as a
| nested equation. Of cause this is rather lose semantics
| since both are expressions or statements and not
| equations, but that's how the language is typically used.
|
| This is what that looks like in wolfram alpha: https://ww
| w.wolframalpha.com/input?i=1%2B%28%28%28%28a-b%29%... It
| looks the same in Mathematica while your typing it in,
| which makes I extremely easy to work with, because even
| very complex equations look exactly like usual in
| Mathematica instead of ending up looking like lisp
| implementation of the Fibonacci sequence._
| MikePlacid wrote:
| > looking like lisp implementation of the Fibonacci
| sequence.
|
| I wonder if Lisp can benefit from a similar 2d
| visualization sugar.
| pmayrgundter wrote:
| Yeah, the nesting Viz shouldn't be too hard. Just nested
| divs in HTML really.
|
| And super/sub scripts are in HTML as well.
|
| Unicode is doing all the symbols these days
|
| Param placement like n=0 under a summation, etc are a
| little more idiosyncratic
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Cool: the fact that I'm asking suggests I do, though. And I
| _absolutely_ want to see the _results_ in maths, not in
| programming notation. If I 'm solving a complicated bit of
| maths, I want to see the result _and_ intermediary steps as
| maths, not as programming code.
| tgv wrote:
| I sometimes use wxMaxima. For my needs it works perfectly
| fine. Nice to know there are people working on the interface,
| because you definitely need to know quite a bit about
| different functions with similar tasks.
|
| Would you know how Mathics compares to Maxima? Mathics'
| information is pretty sparse.
| erremerre wrote:
| I always find the same problem with all Mathematica clones
| (Mathics, Sage, wxMaxima).
|
| Do they offer a .exe that I can install, then click on a button
| and start a program without any tinkering. Mathics and Sage no.
| wxMaxima yes. Although I always had the feeling that wxMaxima is
| more an alternative to Derive than Mathematica at this point.
|
| Mathematica works because it is easy to deal with, no installing
| packages, libraries, libraries incompatible with others. You have
| Mathematica 9, you got all that Mathematica 9 supports. You send
| a notebook to someone else, they can execute the notebook if
| their mathematica version is equal or larger.
|
| It is like saying that Latex is an alternative to word. No, they
| both make documents, but one is not an alternative to the other
| one.
| [deleted]
| l0b0 wrote:
| Is there a reasonably neutral comparison of Mathics vs
| Mathematica anywhere?
|
| Based on an amazing showcase[1] Mathematica is right at the top
| of my list of languages to learn if it (and at least some of the
| surrounding tooling) ever becomes open source. I wonder how many
| of those examples would give useful results in Mathics, or what
| their equivalents would be.
|
| [1] https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/44683/9570
| techdragon wrote:
| As much as I admire the power behind the "wolfram language",
| it's just never going to be open sourced, never going to really
| be available for a hobbyist to learn, never viable for a
| startup to build their entire data analysis core value on top
| of, its just never going to happen... Stephen Wolfram would die
| before he gave up control, the entire thing is his precious
| child. His track record at Wolfram Research is well
| established.
|
| Mathematica could be so much more, but basically until Stephen
| dies, it will remain an academic mathematical tool. It's a
| complete coin flip as to when he dies the company will collapse
| or thrive, but it's just so far away from anything they have
| plans for at the moment that it's just impossible to guess.
| kccqzy wrote:
| The Home version is surprisingly cheap. I became so reliant
| on Mathematica from my student days that I just have to buy
| the Home version after graduation.
| q-big wrote:
| > never going to really be available for a hobbyist to learn
|
| That's not true: here is the pricing for the Home and Hobby
| licenses:
|
| > https://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/pricing/home-hobby/
|
| These prices are not cheap, but affordable if you are serious
| about your hobby.
| Syzygies wrote:
| > Stephen Wolfram would die before he gave up control, the
| entire thing is his precious child.
|
| I understand that Wolfram made unrealistic agreements with
| the original programmers, incompatible with growing a large
| organization to support his evolving vision for Mathematica.
| Rather than renegotiating, he attempted a maneuver that did
| not survive a court challenge. The original programmers are
| now rich.
|
| I cannot find any account of this on the web. There's an
| unrelated "Fields medalist car accident" that I again know
| from first-hand accounts, that also has no trace on the web.
| Huh.
| radford-neal wrote:
| Interesting. I do recall that quite a few years ago I
| happened to talk with one of the original programmers (I
| won't say their name here, though I remember it), who
| complained that Wolfram had basically stolen from them.
| That must have been before the court victory.
|
| So if anyone's wondering, this post does seem to be based
| on something, even if it's not easily verifiable.
| Syzygies wrote:
| Yes, surely they would have told you had they lost.
| Instead, silence and a change in spending habits.
|
| I don't know here that "not easily verifiable" is
| deliberate, but it could be.
|
| In the case of the Fields Medalist, one can read in major
| publications that they engaged a PR firm. Those articles
| don't specifically spell out sanitizing the web. If one
| already knows every detail of the event in question (in
| my case, confirmation includes overhearing him express
| concerns about a wrongful death lawsuit), an internet
| search finds many accounts relaying a cover story, and a
| single forum comment that correctly describes the event.
| That comment was apparently beyond the PR firm's reach.
| elefanten wrote:
| What about web archiving services? Do these sanitizing PR
| maneuvers take those down as well? That'd be an alarming
| revelation to me.
| rnk wrote:
| So who is the fields medalist? Interestingly a Google
| search didn't find that. I'm guessing they were somehow
| at fault or were drinking. I'm sure if I ever had a car
| accident where I hurt someone or I was drunk or
| something, I'd be ashamed, horrified and probably not
| want anyone to know. But because I'm a nobody, nobody
| would care. If I was the greatest engineer ever it might
| be on everything written about me in the future, which
| would be really horrible in a way. But if this person did
| something dangerous it shouldn't necessarily remain a
| secret. The problem with these things is powerful people
| can block discussion of them by threatening lawsuits.
| imglorp wrote:
| > hobbyist
|
| At least there's a minimized version in Raspbian. It ran fine
| on an old B model, snappy enough to play around.
|
| https://www.wolfram.com/raspberry-pi/
| [deleted]
| ur-whale wrote:
| > it's just never going to be open sourced
|
| Mathematica is a prime, tender and juicy target for modern
| reverse engineering tools.
| c7b wrote:
| The thing about Mathematica / the Wolfram language is that it's
| quite a bit harder to create an open source interpreter than it
| was for eg R (which is actually a FOSS interpteter for the
| commercial package S) or for Matlab (not sure what the status
| of Octave, the FOSS interpeter for Matlab code, is, I read an
| entry on a mailing list a long time ago that its sole dev was
| giving up). A lot of the symbolic solvers that are used under
| the hood are Wolfram's IP, and it would be a monumental effort
| to recreate something similarly powerful from scratch.
| psychphysic wrote:
| You've heard of SageMath right?
|
| The biggest thing missing from SageMath is a step by step
| solver. (Edit to add a caveat, I'm sure many professionals
| depend on minutiae of one or the other)
|
| Feature-wise I'd say Sage has more Mathematica functionality
| than Octave does for MATLAB. Sage is not trying to be
| compatible however presumably it wouldn't be that hard if the
| functionality is there?
|
| Sage is a bit of a Frankenstein though
| westurner wrote:
| SageMath (and the cocalc-docker image, and JupyterLite, and
| mambaforge, ) include SymPy; which can be called with
| `evaluate=False`
|
| Advanced Expression Manipulation > Prevent expression
| evaluation: https://docs.sympy.org/latest/tutorials/intro-
| tutorial/manip...
|
| > _There are generally two ways to prevent the evaluation,
| either pass an evaluate=False parameter while constructing
| the expression, or create an evaluation stopper by wrapping
| the expression with UnevaluatedExpr._
|
| From "disabling automatic simplification in sympy"
| https://stackoverflow.com/a/48847102 :
|
| > _A simpler way to disable automatic evaluation is to use
| context manager evaluate. For example,_
| from sympy.core.evaluate import evaluate from
| sympy.abc import x,y,z with evaluate(False):
| print(x/x)
|
| sage.symbolic.expression.Expression.unhold() and
| `hold=True`: https://doc.sagemath.org/html/en/reference/cal
| culus/sage/sym...
|
| IIRC there is a Wolfram Jupyter kernel?
|
| WolframResearch/WolframLanguageForJupyter: https://github.c
| om/WolframResearch/WolframLanguageForJupyter
|
| mathics/IMathics is the Jupyter kernel for mathics:
| https://github.com/mathics/IMathics@main#egg=imathics
| #pip install jupyter_console imathics #conda install
| -c conda-forge -y jupyter_console jupyterlab mamba
| install -y jupyter_console jupyterlab jupyter console
| jupyter kernelspec list pip install -e
| git+https://github.com/mathics/imathics@main#egg=mathics
| jupyter console --kernel= %? %logstart?
| %logstart -o demo.log.py
|
| There are Jupyter kernels for Python, Mathics, Wolfram, R,
| Octave, Matlab, xeus-cling, allthekernels (the polyglot
| kernel). https://github.com/jupyter/jupyter/wiki/Jupyter-
| kernels https://github.com/ml-tooling/best-of-
| jupyter#jupyter-kernel...
|
| The Python Jupyter kernel checks
| IPython.display.display()'d objects for methods in order to
| represent an object in a command line shell, graphical
| shell (qtconsole), notebook (.ipynb), or a latex document:
| _repr_mimebundle_(), _repr_html_(), _repr_json_(),
| _repr_latex_(), ..., __repr__(), __str__()
|
| The last expression in an input cell of a notebook is
| implictly displayed: from IPython.display
| import display %display? # argspec, docstring
| %display?? # ' & source code
| display(last_expresssion)
|
| Symbolic CAS mobile apps with tabling and charting and
| varying levels of support for complex numbers and
| quaternions, for example: Wolfram Mathematica, Desmos,
| Geogebra, JupyterLite, Jupyter on mobile
| musicale wrote:
| > not sure what the status of Octave
|
| I'm glad that Octave and Scilab exist, but I switched to
| NumPy and never looked back.
| onos wrote:
| A virtue of it being private is that they have many paid
| people responsible for maintaining the software. I once wrote
| to them about a special function returning incorrect values
| and they had it fixed the next day.
|
| I consider Mathematica a true gift to humanity.
| david38 wrote:
| I used to work for them. This was a common occurrence. Not
| the errors, but the taking of errors very seriously.
| blablabla123 wrote:
| I doubt it, probably also because the price tag is so far away
| from cheap/for free if you cannot go for any student program in
| which case the question probably doesn't even pop up
| q-big wrote:
| That's not true: here is the pricing for the Home and Hobby
| licenses:
|
| > https://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/pricing/home-hobby/
|
| These prices are not cheap, but affordable if you are serious
| about your hobby.
| WoahNoun wrote:
| Mathematica has an army of mathematicians working on edge cases
| that only other mathematicians would care about. It's essentially
| impossible for any open source software to match what mathematica
| does.
| bowsamic wrote:
| Yep, this is why no other software can compete. People don't
| realise that mathematica consists of huge lists of hard coded
| cases for different mathematical problems. It's not like they
| managed to find the general formula for everything. And there
| are functions that I rely on that literally no other software
| has, that I haven't even managed to find any papers that would
| even hint at their implementation, that magically work for
| almost any input. For example, MinimalStateSpace seems to be
| able to find the minimum required form for basically any input
| state space, which is highly non trivial. It's a huge amount of
| work going into niche mathematical problems that even most
| people in STEM won't have heard of. I don't see how others can
| compete
| smithmayowa wrote:
| This is so true for instance mathematica's treatment on
| numerical integration is the most complete I have seen out
| there so many methods that work on very minute and specific
| type of functions, this is even more so when you're working
| with functions that have singularities in them, and therefore
| need to be treated piecewisely, or functions that are highly
| oscillating.
|
| (https://reference.wolfram.com/language/tutorial/NIntegrateIn
| ...)
| bowsamic wrote:
| Yeah and tbh that's even the simple stuff. Those are widely
| needed, very common situations in practical
| mathematical/physical calculations. The thing that is
| really crazy is that the stuff that literally doesn't even
| exist in any other software, but is really necessary, such
| as in my case a full symbolic control systems library, is
| still absurdly complete.
|
| That's why nothing can compete. Not only does Mathematica
| have an extremely complete implementation of common
| functionality, it even has an extremely complete
| implementation of very niche functionality. I don't think
| that the people who propose OSS solutions really appreciate
| this, probably because they aren't professional
| mathematicians/physicists
| bigbacaloa wrote:
| Much other software can and does compete. Professional
| mathematicians use any number of other programs as well as
| simply writing their own.
| bowsamic wrote:
| No, it can't compete, because there will always be things
| that other software cannot do that _only_ Mathematica can.
| That's why sympy is a non-starter for many mathematicians
| and physicists
| physPop wrote:
| Maple is pretty close, better in some areas worse in
| others.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Check out https://github.com/leanprover-community/mathlib .
| Sure, it's not really a CAS but CAS algorithms could be added
| to it where applicable, since Lean is a constructive system and
| can thus express formally verified computations.
| Smaug123 wrote:
| The existence of https://github.com/robertylewis/mathematica
| makes me think it's more likely to go in the other direction,
| where you treat powerful tools as untrusted oracles which
| produce certificates that Lean then verifies.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Sure that's possible, but "untrusted oracles" are only
| useful if they provide easily-verified certificates. Some
| CAS problems are amenable to that approach, but not all.
| There's no difference in this case between Mma and, e.g. an
| external SAT/SMT solver.
| Roark66 wrote:
| Haven't we had scipy for ages? It is a real OS replacement for
| Mathematica. It can even run a lot of its scripts/code (sometimes
| with minor changes).
|
| In fact reading the linked page it appears they "build on top of"
| scipy.
| dagw wrote:
| Are you confusing scipy and sage? Sage is basically trying to
| fill the Mathematica space in the Open Source world. However
| they have completely different syntax (Sage is python and
| Mathematica uses its own Wolfram language) and you cannot run
| just run Mathematica script in Sage.
| mkl wrote:
| SciPy definitely can't run Mathematica scripts. It's a
| numerical library for Python that adds on to NumPy with special
| functions, optimisation, DE solving, etc.
| ogogmad wrote:
| Scipy is for numerical computation. It's not a CAS.
|
| While Sympy (which is one of the OSS libraries used in Mathics)
| is a CAS, it only implements a subset of the features of
| Mathematica, and not to the same standard. See here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33478881
| someweirdperson wrote:
| I don't get the idea of re-running mathmatica scripts. I haven't
| used it 20 years, but always saw it as an algebra system. There's
| no re-running. Once the math is done it's done. Proving
| (manually) the correctness of the result is usually easier than
| finding it. Feeding numbers into the equations can be done
| elsewhere.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| This looks difficult to install. I can see there's a core command
| line module and a GUI in different projects. I don't see a
| homebrew incantation or macOS installer or anything like that.
| Looks like python dependency hell.
| hpcjoe wrote:
| From what I see, it's
|
| _pip3 install Mathics-omnibus_
|
| levels of hard. I'm missing some libraries on one of my
| machines, but I'm planning on playing with it.
| kzrdude wrote:
| It's missing mysql_config. Sounds a bit much to require
| mysql, for easy installation.
| __ryan__ wrote:
| Compared to what? What about the docker image? It's effectively
| a development environment for math, and it's seemingly robust.
| It doesn't seem particularly wasteful in its use of
| dependencies specifically has the goal of interfacing with
| other open source tools. Rolling their own X for everything
| rather than using the de-facto third party libraries seems like
| a fine, manageable choice to me.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| Compared to Mathematica, which has an installer, and a cloud
| version. Docker image does sound useful, for a more technical
| user.
| indymike wrote:
| Expecting a project like this to come out of the box with
| the polish of a decades old tool isn't quite fair is it?
| BrenBarn wrote:
| But if it doesn't, then it's not really an alternative to
| Mathematica.
| aussieshibe wrote:
| That's quite subjective.
|
| To someone with no money to spend, Mathematica isnt
| really an alternative to Mathics.
| __ryan__ wrote:
| Is a pen not an alternative to a pencil? Different
| features and tradeoffs; it depends on preference and
| context. If anything it's less of an alternative if
| there's no differences, otherwise it would be byte-for-
| byte Mathematica and you'd be unable to choose between
| the two.
| indymike wrote:
| Perhaps it isn't for some things or if you can't install
| it. But that's really dependent on use case and user,
| isn't it?
| nsxwolf wrote:
| Well, I bought Mathematica decades ago, from the
| university book store. It came in a box and had an
| installer.
| __ryan__ wrote:
| Then it's an alternative for technical users.
| vtail wrote:
| I'm a big, big fan of Wolfram Language - as a recreational
| mathematician and programmer, there is _nothing_ else I would
| rather do my explorations with.
|
| As always in these discussions, I expect many people will start
| complaining about how expensive Mathematica is, and how Stephen
| Wolfram is very shortsighted with his pricing, and how open
| sourcing it would truly unlock all the potential of the system.
|
| And I seriously doubt this point of view. Open sourcing is not a
| magic dust that automatically makes everything better. While it
| works in some cases, it doesn't work in others - and not having a
| competitive open source mathematical system is a prove of that.
|
| Hiring people to develop and evolve complex algorithms, on work
| on improving the UI and making it work on three different OSes,
| or curate and maintain the knowledge library, takes a lot of
| effort. I'm actually surprised they don't price it higher!
|
| Disclaimer: And yes, I live in a developed country, so $250/year
| for a personal license is not a substantial cost for me. I'm sure
| that somewhat biases my position.
| dfee wrote:
| > Open sourcing is not a magic dust that automatically makes
| everything better.
|
| I think it does.
|
| The market is then on ideas. Long term, someone will build an
| open core business model around Mathics (or similar) and
| that'll create an incentive for Wolfram to reprioritize and
| pursue the best ideas.
|
| The same will happen for this new biz with the open core
| business model. It will continue to fray as industry figures
| out what the market wants, pruning poor ideas/execution and
| rewarding good ideas/execution.
|
| Let's go!
| zzo38computer wrote:
| > Open sourcing is not a magic dust that automatically makes
| everything better.
|
| > I think it does.
|
| I think that it does not automatically make it better,
| although open source does improve the potential for making it
| better, compared with not making open source.
|
| There are also other advantages of FOSS, too. Even if you do
| not modify it, there are benefits to examine the code to find
| undesirable behaviours, reading the code to figure out
| something that cannot be figured out from the documentation,
| avoiding worrying about copyright issues as much as
| proprietary code, etc. And then, further benefits may be
| possible if the code might be modified, too.
| vtail wrote:
| Respectfully, I disagree with that premise. That clearly
| hasn't happened with OpenSage, Maxima, or half a dozen other
| old open source computer algebra systems, many of which were
| around as long as Mathematica.
|
| If the open sourcing a system works as you describe - why
| haven't those system received even a tenth of a polish that
| Mathematica has, over all these years?
|
| I have my answer: because, even with all its warts, producing
| something of Mathematica quality requires tremendous
| coordinated efforts of hundreds of highly qualified
| professionals who need to be tightly coordinated.
|
| If you try the "next best thing" - a few core enthusiasts
| plus a large number of users who do occasional contribution
| you can get to (an impressive) quality level of the above
| mentioned alternatives, but not higher.
| dfee wrote:
| You're missing the ingredient of time.
|
| Software (as an industry) was born with the right
| structure. That's why it moves so quickly.
|
| Other industries (incl. research) need to fix internal
| problems before they can accelerate, i.e. tightening
| feedback loops such as procurement cycles. Over time,
| institutions who can do more with less will outmaneuver
| even Wolfram.
|
| The future of the world isn't limited by one guy leading
| one company.
| omaranto wrote:
| It's true that Mathematica has more polish than Sage, but
| conversely Sage has vastly more pure math functionality
| than Mathematica (Mathematica seems to me to have focused
| on data analytics and neglected mathematics), so the
| projects just have different focus.
| analog31 wrote:
| In agreement: Creating "polished" software is enormously costly
| in time and effort, and involves the kind of work that people
| only tend to do for money: Elaborate GUI's, installers for
| multiple platforms, etc. Keeping specialized domain knowledge
| experts happy over a long time span costs money, because they
| probably know that they could jump ship and do mainstream
| development for even more money.
|
| And the tools have to do _everything_ because people outside of
| the programming world can 't implement missing features
| themselves. Programmers can create programming tools, but
| mechanical engineers can't create CAD tools.
|
| Of course there are downsides: Giving up everything that you
| get with open-source is a lot. Creating "everything" tools
| makes them bloated. Having to follow the rules of marketing
| encourages planned obsolescence and a continual upgrade cycle.
| Finite resources encourages focusing on "core competency"
| rather than making general purpose tools.
|
| The choice to use less-polished but free tools is a tradeoff
| that makes sense for most programmers, and people like myself
| who are not employed as programmers _per se_ , but do a lot of
| programming to support our work.
|
| If someone wants to develop a free "alternative," their best
| bet is to piggy-back on existing free tools. So for instance, a
| programming language benefits from free text editors. A
| specialized math or science tool might benefit from being
| served up as a package with a Python API. And so forth.
| [deleted]
| shezi wrote:
| This looks really nice and people interested in mathematical
| computing should try it out. I certainly will.
|
| Apparently many commenters here do not understand the word
| "alternative", which means "a thing that you can choose to do or
| have out of two or more possibilities", and instead take it as
| "equal in every respect".
| ccbccccbbcccbb wrote:
| I thought that all the fuzz about something being _close source /
| commercial aka overpriced_ is not worth a hill of beans, because
| if it doesn't fit your ideals/wallet you just use what fits.
|
| But no, there's always a discourse about how unfair, unethical,
| greedy etc the developers of _closed source / commercial aka
| overpriced_ software are, which vividly displays that the actual
| sentiment in these complaints is pure and simple envy, towards
| better things that cost more, towards developers who make a
| living off their own projects and don't feel obliged to worship
| the ideals of open source, free as in beer, cheap as in dirt
| etc...
| accurrent wrote:
| Open source software doesnt have to be free as in beer. I
| actually make a decent living off writing oss software. For the
| most part the work is like consultancy (we have paying clients
| request features). Despite being an oss dev I do actually pay
| for software I think is worth it. I think the major issue with
| mathematica is that it is _really_ pricy for paid software (and
| not great at that, ive run into many bugs with it).
| batmanturkey wrote:
| bmitc wrote:
| I'm never sure why projects try to claim themselves as a free
| alternative to Mathematica. For one, they never seem to reach
| anywhere near the polish and power of Mathematica. And secondly,
| is Mathematica really that expensive if you use it in your
| job/industry?
|
| For hobbyists, Mathematica is free on a Raspberry Pi, which
| probably runs better than any alternative, and has a pretty
| reasonable price point if you buy the real thing for personal
| use.
|
| For students/professors, Mathematica is basically already free at
| most major universities.
| ogogmad wrote:
| > For students/professors, Mathematica is basically already
| free at most major universities.
|
| I think this is usually an on-premise license, and not a
| license to use it on your own computer offline.
|
| You can use it on the cloud. I'm not sure what else you can do
| with such a license.
| kome wrote:
| it's nice you find it cheap, because i find it very very
| expensive.
| lixtra wrote:
| > For students/professors, Mathematica is basically already
| free at most major universities.
|
| When I was still in academia I avoided close source because I
| want my research to be accessible. It does make a difference if
| you need to go through some strange license portal to activate
| your university license or if you can just install it in one
| line.
|
| For me that meant that my scripts run in octave as good as in
| matlab, if this was feasible (and of course many packages exist
| only for matlab).
| evanb wrote:
| Mathematica has so much closed-source hidden stuff under the
| hood that there's a question of correctness. I've certainly
| found bugs / wrong mathematical facts before.
| bmitc wrote:
| There's a question of correctness for any system, no matter
| how closed or open.
| ykonstant wrote:
| But the process of answering that question is vastly
| different.
| Karliss wrote:
| Yes, but having results verified with multiple different
| software increases the chance that correctness problems
| will noticed sooner.
| an1sotropy wrote:
| Can you share an example of it getting math wrong?
| [deleted]
| an1sotropy wrote:
| There used to be another answer here, with a specific link,
| but now it's gone. I thought I upvoted it, but I'm worried
| my fumble fingers on my tiny phone downvoted it by
| accident.
| dagw wrote:
| Here is an article from 2014 by a (group of) mathematicians
| who used Mathematica extensively in their research
| describing the problems they had with Mathematica when
| trying to calculate the determinant of a Matrix containing
| large integers (on the order of 10k digits). The bug was
| reported in Mathematica 7 and was still there in
| Mathematica 10.
|
| https://www.ams.org/notices/201410/rnoti-p1249.pdf
|
| Back when I was using Mathematica a lot (2005-2010ish) the
| Mathematica usenet group kept an archive of all errors in
| Mathematica people had found, but it seems to have
| disappeared off the Internet.
|
| If you browse the [bugs] tag in
| mathematica.stackexchange.com you'll find a few as well
| (although admittedly many of the issues there are user
| errors rather than Mathematica getting it wrong)
| an1sotropy wrote:
| thank for the link to that nice article; it also has some
| other examples of symbolic math packages getting the
| wrong result
| evanb wrote:
| The [bugs] tag on the Mathematica stack exchange has 1900+
| questions
| https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bugs
|
| Here are two that I found:
|
| the character table of some finite groups weren't square
| https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/q/252775/7936 this
| one makes me really nervous as this implies there's not
| unit testing for the most obvious checks (it's a theorem
| that the character table must be square and the check is
| trivial to implement)
|
| conjugate transpose didn't do anything to vectors
| https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/q/258165/7936
|
| There are plenty more where Mathematica produces the wrong
| antiderivative or limit.
| an1sotropy wrote:
| Thanks for this link; I think your reply is the one I saw
| and then couldn't see, but now it's back. I may be
| misunderstanding how HN works.
| mat_epice wrote:
| > For students/professors, Mathematica is basically already
| free at most major universities.
|
| Just because someone else is writing the check doesn't mean
| it's free. Case in point, the pricing for an individual
| Mathematica license for use at a college or university ranges
| from $722/yr to $9k[1], with the customary confusion about what
| is actually included.
|
| [1] https://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/pricing/colleges-
| univers...
| krsrhe wrote:
| [deleted]
| batmanturkey wrote:
| One may want an open source tool for such a foundational
| requirement.
|
| One may decide that it's too unstable or dangerous to base
| one's primary tools in proprietary software land.
|
| I have precisely this concern in my fields of work.
| bigbacaloa wrote:
| Mathematica is prohibitively expensive. I work at a public
| technical university in Europe and we have no licenses for
| mathematica.
| medo-bear wrote:
| > And secondly, is Mathematica really that expensive if you use
| it in your job/industry?
|
| i would pay double/triple the price if it was open source. i
| shudder at the thought of doing scientific work with help of a
| magic black box
| newaccount74 wrote:
| I just checked how much a license of Mathematica for Home &
| Hobby costs.
|
| It's EUR447 one time purchase, or a EUR224/year subscription.
|
| The one time purchase does not include updates, so if something
| breaks with next years macOS update I will probably have to pay
| for an upgrade again.
|
| This license is pretty pricy for something I just buy for fun,
| but arguably worth it if you use it often. But I am not allowed
| to use it for any professional purposes at all. If I just
| wanted to use it to graph the sales numbers of my side projects
| (probably not the best tool for the job, but why learn another
| tool if you have one that does the job?), I would need a
| professional license which is 10x the price.
|
| Being able to run it on the Raspberry Pi for free is nice, but
| I assume it is also limited to "personal use".
|
| Mathematica is ridiculously expensive. It's expensive because
| it's professional software, and there are few alternatives. If
| you use it daily as part of your job, the price is absolutely
| worth it, but if you don't, it's just way overpriced.
|
| When I left university, I would have loved to keep using
| Mathematica, but it was just way too expensive to run it on my
| laptop, for an app that I would just use a few times per year.
| And logging into a Raspberry Pi just to use an even slower
| version of an app that isn't known for being particularly
| responsive in the first place just isn't something that I care
| about.
| stblack wrote:
| > Mathematica is ridiculously expensive
|
| This is something I used to believe.
|
| I am a hobbyist user. Mathematica was not required for my
| work or for any other interests outside personal curiosity
| and an ever growing love of math and science.
|
| I've made it an indispensable part of my work. A small side-
| project in Mathematica blossomed into one of the key ways my
| clients analyze data now.
|
| Mathematica costs less than a dollar a day. It's always open
| among the apps on my desktop on both my work Mac and my
| kitchen Mac.
|
| To stop using Mathematica, you'd have to pry it away from my
| cold, dead hands. It's really that great.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _" I've made it an indispensable part of my work"_
|
| And that's why Mathematica is indispensable to you--
| familiarity and use have made it indispensable.
|
| The trouble is that it's a chicken and egg problem, with
| the program being so expensive many won't have access to it
| to try it--some of whom, if they'd had access, would have
| progressed to your situation.
|
| A program like Mathematica only becomes indispensable to a
| person after he/she has had access to it for long enough to
| become familiar with its workings and for the person to
| actually benefit from the program's features--here that is
| to provide quick mathematical solutions to problems that
| would otherwise take a long time or require tedious
| workings out.
|
| Thus, it's little wonder that so many are looking for
| cheaper alternatives--as they simply haven't developed the
| experience necessary to arrive at the same conclusion that
| you have.
|
| It's unfortunate that's the situation exists and that there
| aren't more products capable of competing with Mathematica
| that have a similar UI experience and calculating
| granularities.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| Are you using the hobby license for professional work? Or
| do they drop the price to less than a dollar a day if you
| ask nicely?
|
| Licenses that you are allowed to use for commercial
| activities are a lot more than a dollar a day according to
| their website.
| kgwgk wrote:
| [insert anything] is ridiculously expensive. If you use it
| the price is absolutely worth it, but if you don't, it's just
| way overpriced.
| aldanor wrote:
| Disagreed. Example: Numi.app and Soulver3.app = both are
| essentially just fancy calculators with built-in unit
| conversions and a few other convenient features. I use them
| maybe once a month, but EUR30 for a lifetime license with
| no subscription is more than ok for what they are.
| danuker wrote:
| I would perhaps say: if it offers you more value (not
| necessarily financial) than its cost, then it's worth it.
|
| But this is a truism also.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| You are misrepresenting my comment by removing essential
| qualifiers: It's worth it if you use it _daily as part of
| your job_.
|
| There are plenty of jobs where Mathematica would be useful
| occasionally, but not every day. For these cases, the
| software is overpriced.
| kgwgk wrote:
| It can also be worth it when used outside of jobs and
| occasionally - in the same way that a bike or a blender
| or a day at a spa can be worth it. I wouldn't say that a
| blender is "ridiculously expensive" because I don't care
| much about smoothies.
| rrwo wrote:
| Depending where you are and what you income is, EUR447 is
| a lot of money to spend on a hobby.
|
| That costs more than a month's rent in some European
| cities https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-
| living/region_prices_by_city?...
| kgwgk wrote:
| Well, in that context one can also say that a EUR447 pair
| of shoes is ridiculously expensive, a EUR447 bike is
| ridiculously expensive, a EUR447 telephone is
| ridiculously expensive, etc.
| Jorengarenar wrote:
| > EUR447 pair of shoes is ridiculously expensive
|
| Well, at this point it's not even ridiculously expensive;
| EUR100 would be ridiculously expensive already.
|
| > a EUR447 bike is ridiculously expensive
|
| Nah, a good bike can easily cost as much; it's an
| investment similar to buying car.
|
| > a EUR447 telephone is ridiculously expensive
|
| It is and it baffles me people are willing to spend even
| more.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| If I wanted to buy a Mathematica license for my use case
| (hobby stuff, use it for my job maybe two times a year)
| it would cost me around 5000EUR. If that isn't
| ridiculously expensive, I don't know what else to call
| it.
| kgwgk wrote:
| I think I misunderstood your first comment - I thought
| you found the "home and hobby" license ridiculously
| expensive.
|
| I'm not sure what that 5000EUR refers to. The standard
| licence is 3880+VAT (I guess that's what you meant), the
| annual one half that price.
|
| If you look at it as "hobby stuff" 500
| "use it for my job maybe two times a year" 4500 extra
|
| maybe the "home and hobby" license makes more sense for
| your use case - use it "cheap" for hobby even though you
| cannot justify paying the full price for work. That's why
| that license was introduced in the first place!
|
| One could also say that a 5000EUR A0 printer is
| "ridiculously expensive" because you want to print only a
| couple of posters. While you would be better off going to
| a print shop it doesn't necessarily indicate any problem
| with the pricing of the machine.
| opan wrote:
| For me, free as in freedom is the primary concern. A
| proprietary programming language seems a bit ridiculous. I
| don't see myself paying for a programming language either,
| though. Libre and gratis are the norm in this space, so going
| against that sticks out in a bad way. It's like text editors
| and web browsers. We've had good free options for a long time.
| Anyone trying to push a non-free option might as well be giving
| out malware. That malware isn't appealing whether it has a
| pricetag or not.
| phforms wrote:
| There is an interesting article about the reasons why Wolfram
| decided against open source and why their products would not
| have been possible otherwise:
| https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-
| op...
|
| As much as I don't like it either, I can understand their
| perspective and actually believe that it might have been very
| hard to create and sustain such a comprehensive, thoughtfully
| and consistently designed language with an open source model.
| But it may be interesting to see if there are projects of
| similar scale with similar requirements that thrive (long-
| term) on a free and open source model.
| xigoi wrote:
| Most of the points in the article are for centralized
| development, which has nothing to do with open source.
| lake_vincent wrote:
| This! I am coding something right now that Mathematica would
| honestly make 100x easier, but I refuse to use it because I
| want _my_ software to be FOSS, and not depend on a
| proprietary language.
|
| I respect Wolfram's enginuity, but I resent his ego for
| keeping us all out of his walled garden.
| analog31 wrote:
| I love Mathematica, though I don't use it today.
|
| Free tools have taken over programming, and I doubt that cost
| is the main reason. I don't know if there are any proprietary
| programming tools in widespread use any more. The same benefits
| might apply to software for "the rest of us."
|
| Outside of truly enlightened organizations, the cost ends up
| being just high enough to trigger all sorts of wasteful habits
| such as: Management approval, dealing with the purchasing
| department (on a recurring basis these days), using outdated
| versions, shared licenses, centralized installations, node
| locking, separate "development" and "run-time" environments,
| and so forth.
|
| For one specialized app that I use at my workplace, it costs a
| few man-hours per year to renew the subscription. The license
| server is on a firewalled domain, maintained by IT, so I can't
| use the software at home unless I carry a computer back and
| forth every day. On my bike.
|
| Use of that software tacitly assumes certain work habits such
| as doing your work mostly in one place.
|
| The cost frustrates sharing. If you want to share something you
| made, your victim has to buy their own license to use it.
|
| In the time that it takes to hash out the purchase of software
| X, I can have my entire toolchain (Python, Arduino, WxMaxima,
| etc) on every computer that I touch: In my office, the labs,
| and at home. This has radically changed how I incorporate
| (mostly) Python into my life at work and at home.
| kgwgk wrote:
| > I don't know if there are any proprietary programming tools
| in widespread use any more.
|
| Isn't Xcode is a widely used programming tool?
| analog31 wrote:
| Ah, good call. I admit that my claim is based on having
| periodically googled "top programming languages" over the
| years. So a few proprietary tools may have fallen through
| my sieve.
| kgwgk wrote:
| Another obvious example is the CUDA toolkit - unless you
| don't consider it a programming tool.
| analog31 wrote:
| This might be a case similar to embedded development,
| which has seen much slower adoption of free tooling.
|
| And I have a pretty broad definition of "programming," so
| by all rights I should have mentioned Excel.
| throwyo223a65 wrote:
| >And secondly, is Mathematica really that expensive if you use
| it in your job/industry?
|
| If you live in a developing country where the average salary is
| $50-$300/month and your company's revenue is similarly thin,
| yes it is really expensive.
|
| I tried to discuss pricing with Mathematica on behalf of one of
| these companies and after a few initial exchanges to assess our
| needs, the sales representatives did not even bother getting
| back to us and started ghosting us.
|
| The world is not limited to wealthy western countries,
| countries in Africa, Asia and other regions of the world are
| increasingly aspiring to develop their technology sector by
| building an ecosystem of engineering companies.
|
| Mathics and similar initiatives are therefore more than
| welcome. Even in a developed country, there are many reasons
| not to want to tie yourself to a proprietary tech so central to
| your operations, especially in today's world. For example, what
| about if you are a Chinese company and the US treasury decides
| to blacklist your company or country?
| 2b3a51 wrote:
| _" countries in Africa, Asia and other regions of the world
| are increasingly aspiring to develop their technology sector
| by building an ecosystem of engineering companies"_
|
| So by basing that ecosystem around open source software where
| appropriate, these companies and their employees can avoid
| the lock in and restrictions of commercial software. I'd
| expect them to be overtaking the tired Western industrial
| world fairly soon - or at least being a lot more nimble.
| fsh wrote:
| I agree that Mathematica is extremely powerful, but in my
| opinion calling it polished is quite a stretch.
|
| The notebook interface has a look and feel as if it was hacked
| together in two weeks in 2004. Kernel startup and function
| evaluations can be extremely slow (how the hell did Mathematica
| 1 run on 1988 hardware?). Sometimes, long-running evaluations
| can be interrupted, sometimes doing it crashes the kernel. The
| arcane functional programming language makes writing procedures
| extremely painful (control flow is handled by nesting If[]
| functions). Plots are borderline unreadable by default.
| Customizing them is very complicated and inflexible compared to
| OOP-based plotting libraries in other languages. Many features
| don't work at all. I once tried exporting an animated plot as a
| video file, and most codecs were simply broken. Sometimes PDF
| exports of plots are Megabyte sized for no good reason.
|
| Instead of fixing such basic stuff, Wolfram keeps adding cloud
| features that nobody asked for and machine learning stuff that
| nobody uses. For the vast majority of users, Mathematica 7 is
| functionally identical to Mathematica 13. Unfortunately, there
| still is no real alternative, so everyone keeps giving them
| lots of money for a frankly very unfinished product.
| [deleted]
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _" Instead of fixing such basic stuff, Wolfram keeps adding
| cloud features that nobody asked for and machine learning
| stuff that nobody uses."_
|
| Unfortunately, Wolfram is not alone and it's the curse of the
| software industry. There are hundreds upon hundreds of
| examples of programs where new usually-unwanted features are
| added at the expense of unfixed bugs and important features
| that are badly implemented and need attention but which its
| developers keep ignoring.
|
| The problem ultimately boils down to us users--first, we
| don't complain loudly enough about obvious problems and
| second, we're all too taken in with promises from marketing
| departments about the benefits the new glitzy features will
| bring but which rarely live up to expectations.
|
| What we don't collectively realize is that poorly finished
| software with bad user ergonomics is enormously costly to
| society in terms of wasted human effort and lost productivity
| when tallied across millions of users.
|
| I qualify that comment from my own experience both as an IT
| professional and as someone who has run an IT department.
| Personally over the years I've lost thousands of hours trying
| to get buggy or poorly implemented software to do some of the
| most basic of core functions that ought to work properly from
| the outset. Same goes for typical users who are forever
| calling on my department's help desk to solve problems that
| ought not exist.
| an1sotropy wrote:
| > Plots are borderline unreadable by default
|
| Really? Of all your complaints that one seems the least true,
| in my experience. I think plots are lovely by default, but
| then 5% of the time it's crap and then I'm cursing, with you,
| at how alien and annoying the whole thing has become.
|
| I used Mathematica in 1988 on a Mac and have been grateful
| that my employment has given me free access ever since. The
| notebook interface feels basically the same to me as it did
| in 1988, when it was an incredible innovation. Now, it is a
| little annoying.
|
| I also don't know what feels unfinished about it, but it
| sounds like you've spent more time wrestling with it than me.
| It has been an incredibly enduring product that still wins at
| symbolic math. And I also hope open source tools can replace
| it in my work.
| fsh wrote:
| In my opinion, the axes labels are way too small and in a
| weird location, the lines are too thin, and the default
| color cycle has many colors that are indistinguishable for
| people with red-green color blindness (8% of all men). I
| have been in many meetings where someone could not read
| some of the Mathematica plots on the slides.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| I agree with your specific comment. And in the more
| general sense (as I've repeated elsewhere) that user
| ergonomics of much software sucks big-time.
|
| In the case of red-green (or any) color blindness the
| simple solution is to provide either a choice of
| predefined colors and or ways of manually overriding the
| defaults--and in relative terms the extra programming
| effort needed to provide this useful functionality is a
| trivial matter.
|
| Sotware manufacturers really do have a damned hide when
| they omit such important features especially when the
| need for them is so obvious.
|
| BTW, I'm not color blind but I've witnessed situations as
| you've mentioned, so too would have the program's
| software developers. That they've not attended to the
| matter makes it all the more annoying.
| vtail wrote:
| How about defining you own PlotTheme and setting
| $PlotTheme in init.m? It's been supported since version
| 10, I believe.
| divbzero wrote:
| TIL: Mathematica is free on Raspberry Pi.
| https://www.wolfram.com/raspberry-pi/
| bmitc wrote:
| Yea, it's a pretty awesome thing, in my opinion. It ran a bit
| slow on the old Raspberry Pis, but the Raspberry Pi 4 is
| obviously much more powerful.
| homarp wrote:
| and Minecraft is also free on RPi
| https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/edition/pi
| hkt wrote:
| And the free version has a neat open source fork that adds
| features: https://github.com/MCPI-Revival/minecraft-pi-
| reborn
| bowsamic wrote:
| > Mathematica is basically already free at most major
| universities.
|
| As a physicist I can say this is definitely not true
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| >I'm never sure why projects try to claim themselves as a free
| alternative to Mathematica.
|
| In this case it's an open-source project reimplementing
| Mathematica (though technically only the Wolfram language).
|
| >For hobbyists, Mathematica is free on a Raspberry Pi,
|
| Also Wolfram Engine (which due to previous technicality is
| closer to Mathics) is free anywhere.
|
| >And secondly, is Mathematica really that expensive if you use
| it in your job/industry?
|
| The point isn't the price but but that an important software
| used in academic research is closed source. Those that value
| open science want to have a way to reproduce results using free
| tools.
| Quequau wrote:
| When I went back to uni, a lot of my classes had us using
| Mathematica. While the software is fine, I found Steven
| Wolfram's relentless promotion a bit off-putting.
|
| Felt a lot like P. T. Barnum somehow and I wasn't really
| comfortable being a customer of someone who made me feel like
| P. T. Barnum was selling me something.
| an1sotropy wrote:
| Thanks; you have aptly expressed the vibe I got trying to
| read through New Kind of Science.
| b33j0r wrote:
| You're not wrong.
|
| It's just the idea of "what if I accidentally turn my dream
| hobby into a success?" and "how do I even call lawyers?" and
| "is any of this worth investing in, on balance?"
| fab13n wrote:
| can't wait to see what people come up with when they'll start
| interfacing it with a modern AI.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| I was really hoping the *.cdf format would take off and
| interactive science papers on the iPad were going to be the
| future.
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| could someone advertise mathematica to me? like, how powerful is
| it? i'm a mathematically trained dev / DE. i'd probably be most
| interested in exploring rabbit holes as i find them, plotting
| things, simulating something etc
| ogogmad wrote:
| It has a better equation-solver and simplifier than anything
| available in open-source. For instance, I have a lot of
| experience with Sympy, but Sympy has no ability to detect that
| an equation has a piecewise solution, while Mathematica does.
| Sympy often finds a solution to an equation that is true _most
| of the time_ but is generally wrong, while Mathematica gives a
| piecewise solution that 's correct in every case.
|
| It also has a great toolset for making interactive plots.
| Assuming you understand the following jargon, it uses the
| functional reactive paradigm.
|
| All possible variable names in Mathematica are pre-declared,
| unlike in general-purpose programming languages.* For instance,
| the variable "x" is predeclared, and when its value is printed
| out, it prints out "x". Sympy and Sage absolutely use the wrong
| approach here. You can work around the problem in Sympy using
| from sympy.abc import *
|
| but this is honestly rather shit.
|
| The editor is nice, in that it suggests documentation, and
| offers to auto-complete your code. It's similar to an IDE in
| that respect. This compares favourably against Maxima, where
| some people suggest to use it via Emacs, and then you don't get
| access to auto-completion or context-relevant documentation.
|
| You can also copy-paste any object in the notebook. I don't
| know if this is directly useful, but the copy-paste includes
| any plot, image, formula, output, etc. The experience is
| similar to MS Office, where you can similarly copy-paste any
| image, table, text, or combination of these. With something
| like Sympy, you would need to use some function to serialise an
| object (like a formula) to code.
|
| Finally, comparison to Sagemath: Everything in Sagemath seems
| half done. It ticks a lot of feature boxes, but the features
| seem incompletely implemented, even when compared to Sympy. By
| contrast, when Mathematica does something, it seems to be done
| in a more complete and usable way. The whole system seems
| consistent, somehow.
|
| * - This is one of the ways that a CAS should not behave like a
| general-purpose language.
| henrydark wrote:
| Working with sage for about 17 years, I've had the complete
| opposite experience. There is no alternative for holistic
| number theory, group theory, and algebraic geometry (except
| maybe MAGMA, which I haven't used in years), and sage does
| these extremely well (sometimes with the aid of things like
| Gap and PARI), and this is evident by the large number of
| citations it has in papers. Plenty of leading mathematicians
| use sage in proper research, a property which I don't think
| Mathematica shares.
| ogogmad wrote:
| Maybe my criticisms are superficial, then. I guess
| superficially some problems with Sagemath I've found:
|
| - If you do matrix algebra in it, it rigidly insists on
| knowing which ring your matrix-elements belong to. If you
| have a symbolic variable, then you need to indicate this as
| part of the ring. Some functionality is not available for
| certain rings, which sometimes feels overly pedantic;
| surely a best-case effort could somehow be made? I haven't
| tried this for a while, but I remember this was an obstacle
| that I hadn't encountered in Mathematica (or Sympy), which
| seemed to just do the right thing. Note that normally when
| working with real- and complex-algebras, I usually resort
| to various matrix representations.
|
| - The pretty-printer wasn't good. Maybe my mistake was
| insisting it print to Unicode, but it failed to pretty-
| print the elements of a matrix. It defaulted to printing
| out Python code within a matrix. Maybe this is a bug? Maybe
| I should've just outputted to Latex?
|
| - The variables weren't pre-declared, so I kept having to
| write out `var("x")`, etc. This is not ergonomic for a CAS.
| Sagemath doesn't even ship with a hack like `from sympy.abc
| import *`.
| onos wrote:
| Mathematica enjoys a near monopoly among theoretical
| physicists. I imagine sage and mathematica then are simply
| targeting different applications.
| ohbtvz wrote:
| A colleague wrote a blog post here:
| https://idrissi.eu/post/mathematica
| amai wrote:
| Why does Mathics not make use of jupyter notebooks? It seem they
| are reinventing the wheel a bit.
| drhodes wrote:
| Hi, they did at one point: https://github.com/mathics/IMathics
| ohbtvz wrote:
| > Documentation for the Mathics system is provided in the PDF
| format (download the PDF).
|
| Seriously? I'm already tired of latex packages only being
| documented as PDF, but at least there's a technical reason. Here,
| this is just contempt for the users.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| What else would you require, or what would be more appropriate?
| namibj wrote:
| Appropriate? The Wolfram Language documentation of
| mathematics, the way it's accessible online as hypertext.
| ohbtvz wrote:
| HTML. Take a look at Mathematica's documentation:
| https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/Solve.html
| hilbert42 wrote:
| Agreed, it does seem an unacceptable oversight that
| HTML/MathML and perhaps also LaTeX and Open Document format
| etc. are missing--for reasons they're convenient to use as
| is and or are easy starting points for conversion to other
| formats.
|
| One wonders why the omission given Mathematica's vintage--
| one would have thought that by now Wolfram would have had
| time to write the output format routines.
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