[HN Gopher] Wolfram Compute Services
___________________________________________________________________
Wolfram Compute Services
Author : nsoonhui
Score : 214 points
Date : 2025-12-06 07:21 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (writings.stephenwolfram.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (writings.stephenwolfram.com)
| fsh wrote:
| Maybe with the power of a supercomputer, Mathematica can finally
| launch in less than 30s. I have no idea how a software that still
| does essentially the same thing as it did in 1988 can be that
| sluggish.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yet there is hardly any computing system that can replicate
| Mathematica tooling capabilities.
|
| One would expect 37 years would be enough to create such
| alternative.
|
| Jupiter notebooks aren't the same.
| pfortuny wrote:
| Honest question: I think Maple is really a competitor, even
| if less known.
| freehorse wrote:
| Prob I am a very small minority here, but I used Maple a
| lot in the past and I liked it a lot. More standard syntax
| than mathematica, and overall much much easier to debug. In
| particular, as far as I remember, maple allowed for more
| transparency in the mathematical methods used in some
| computation than mathematica, as I could just see what it
| was doing exactly when an unexpected result came or I
| wanted to understand some method. When you work a lot with
| integrals, limits and special functions there is always a
| shit ton of assumptions and cases all over the place, and
| if something is missed somewhere the computation can just
| get wrong. There were some few times I would actually get
| wrong results in mathematica. When the language is more
| like a black box, it is hard to know what happened.
| pfortuny wrote:
| That is also my feeling, although it has been ages since
| I last worked with Maple. But some colleagues of mine at
| other uni do use it instead of Mathematica. Thanks for
| the detailed reply!
| xvilka wrote:
| Sage Math? Though I admit, unlike homogeneous Mathematica,
| it's just a Python glue on multiple smaller projects of
| different quality and poorly integrated. I wish there was
| something more like the Wolfram software but there isn't.
| fsh wrote:
| I quite like Sage. Python is a much better language than
| Wolfram (yes, he named it after himself...). In Wolfram,
| there is no real scoping (even different notebooks share
| all variables, Module[] is incredibly clumsy), no real
| control flow (If[] is just a function), and no real error
| handling. When Wolfram encounters an exception, it just
| prints a red message and keeps chugging along with the
| output of the error'd function being replaced by a symbolic
| expression. This usually leads to pages and pages of
| gibberish and/or crashes the kernel (which for some reason
| is quite difficult to interrupt or restart). Together with
| the notebook format and the laughable debugger, this makes
| finding errors extremely frustrating.
|
| The notebooks are also difficult to version control
| (unreadable diffs for minor changes), and unit testing is
| clearly just an afterthought. Also the GUI performance is
| bad. Put more than a hand full of plots on a page, and
| everything slows to a crawl. What keeps me coming back is
| the comprehensive function library, and the formula inputs.
| I find it quite difficult to spot mistakes in mathematical
| expressions written in Python syntax.
| disentanglement wrote:
| Fully agreed. I have never seen a programming language
| which is so badly designed as Wolfram. I really wish
| there was another way to access all of Mathematica's
| functionality with a more sane interface.
| gucci-on-fleek wrote:
| > Python is a much better language than Wolfram
|
| Different languages are better at different things, so it
| rarely makes much sense to say that one language is
| better than another in general. Python is definitely much
| better than Mathematica for "typical" imperative
| programming tasks (web servers, CLI programs, CRUD apps,
| etc.), but Mathematica is much better at data processing,
| symbolic manipulation, drawing plots, and other similar
| tasks.
|
| > there is no real scoping (even different notebooks
| share all variables, Module[] is incredibly clumsy)
|
| Scoping is indeed an absolute mess, and the thing that I
| personally find the most irritating about the language.
|
| > no real control flow (If[] is just a function)
|
| You're meant to program Mathematica by using patterns and
| operating on lists as a whole, so you should _rarely_
| need to use branching /control flow/If[]. It's a very
| different style of programming that takes quite a while
| to get used to, but it works really well for some tasks.
|
| > no real error handling
|
| For input validation, you should use the pattern features
| to make it impossible to even call the function with
| invalid input. And for errors in computation, it often
| makes the most sense to return "Undefined", "Null",
| "Infinity", or something similar, and then propagate that
| through the rest of the expression.
|
| > The notebooks are also difficult to version control
| (unreadable diffs for minor changes)
|
| Mathematica notebooks tend to do _slightly_ better with
| version control than Jupyter Notebooks, although they 're
| both terrible. You can work around this with Git
| clean/smudge filters, or you can just use ".wls"/".py"
| files directly.
| cricalix wrote:
| On the note of Jupyter notebooks and version control -
| there was a talk at this year's Pycon Ireland about using
| a built in cleaner for notebooks when committing the JSON
| (discard the cell results), and then dropping the whole
| lot into a CI system utilising remote execution (and
| Bazel or similar) to run and cache the outputs. Was a
| talk from CodeThink. No video up yet though. Scenario was
| reproducible notebooks for processing data from a system
| under test.
| jimbokun wrote:
| For writing production code, I find good scoping rules
| non-negotiable. And error handling, monitoring etc has to
| be well thought out before deploying at scale.
|
| So as great as Mathematica sounds for interactive math
| and science computations, sounds like a poor tool for
| building systems that will be deployed and used by many
| people.
| qbit42 wrote:
| That is a fair assessment. By and large it is used for
| the former. It is super handy in the exploratory phase of
| certain kinds of mathematical research.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yeah, but that was my point, similar capabilities, not a
| bunch of tools glued together, poorly integrated, as you
| point out.
| pfortuny wrote:
| Have you tried Maple? It is also proprietary but it comes
| from (originally) Waterloo University, and is used in
| Academia too.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| I tried Sage Math. Just the fact that one has to declare
| all variables before using them, makes it extremely
| annoying. In Mathematica, I frequently do computations
| which have a couple of dozen variables. I am not going to
| write boiler plate for 20 different variables in every
| notebook.
| amha wrote:
| I've used Sage for years to run the backend
| (calculations/computations/graphics/prototyping) for a
| multivariable calculus class I teach. It's not perfect, but
| as a lightweight, Python-style CAS to do all sorts of
| "standard" calculations, it's very easy to use!
| hebejebelus wrote:
| I think it's an extreme example of not-invented-here syndrome.
| In many ways that leads to interesting novelties, and in others
| it leads to not having undo/redo until the 2010s.
| Smaug123 wrote:
| In fairness the problem is not _easy_! JupyterLab only got
| document-wide undo /redo in 2021 per https://jupyterlab.readt
| hedocs.io/en/3.1.x/getting_started/c... .
| jebarker wrote:
| This is how I feel about basically all consumer software
| pjmlp wrote:
| I love this, too many people keep themselves busy discussing bits
| and bytes, or Stephen Wolfram's personality.
|
| The reality is that by now we should already be at a level where
| common programming would be like Wolfram everywhere.
|
| Maybe agents and LLM driven code generation is how we eventually
| get into the next abstraction level, sadly won't be without
| casualties with smaller team sizes, when so much can be automated
| away.
| creata wrote:
| > The reality is that by now we should already be at a level
| where common programming would be like Wolfram everywhere.
|
| What aspects of the Wolfram language should be everywhere? The
| easy access to lots of datasets? The easy access to lots of
| mathematical functions? CAS in general?
| pjmlp wrote:
| All of those, plus having an interactive graphical
| environment, debugging experience and optimisation when
| needed.
|
| Basically the ideas of Smalltalk and Lisp Machine variations,
| that are still only partially available in modern IDEs, and
| proudly ignored by the _" vt100 rules and vi first"_ minded
| devs.
| TheTaytay wrote:
| Yes!
|
| Reminds me of the "Stop writing Dead Programs" talk.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33270235
| wasmainiac wrote:
| Hi Stephen, is that you?
|
| Jokes and sales pitches aside. We kinda have that already, we
| platforms that allow us to run the same code on, x86, arm,
| wasm... and so on. It's just there is no consensus on which
| platform to use. Nor should there be since that would slow
| progress of new and better ways to program.
|
| We will never have one language to span graphics, full stack,
| embedded, scientific, high performance, etc without excessive
| bloat.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Many VCs today would vouch that would be agentic AI.
| wasmainiac wrote:
| No. I work in VC backed startups. Externally they might say
| that for investors, but talk to a software engineer.
| Agentic IA is not working, it will regurgitate code from
| examples online, but if you get it to do something complex
| or slightly novel, it falls flat on its face.
|
| Maybe it will someday be good enough, but not today, and
| probably not for at least 5 years.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Meanwhile there are people delivering solutions in iPaaS
| tools, which is quite far from the traditional
| programming that gets discussed on HN.
|
| Some of those tools aren't yet fully there, but also
| aren't completely dumb, they get more done in a day, than
| trying to do the same workflows with classical
| programming.
|
| Workato, Boomi, Powerapps, Opal,...
| wasmainiac wrote:
| How is that relevant to this thread?
| metayrnc wrote:
| I really like this way of introducing a new feature/service.
| Straight to the point, explains what it does, which problem it
| solves, gives practical examples and walks the reader through
| them. So many times when I read about a new feature/service I am
| left with more questions than I had started with, but this was
| great!
| hebejebelus wrote:
| One of the more interesting things about WL is that Stephen
| Wolfram is really a genuine daily user of the software his
| company makes and he's the final say on what ships and in what
| form. They used to livestream his meetings reviewing potential
| new features on Youtube, an interesting watch. It didn't make
| me want to work there but I did feel like he cared very much.
| Quite Jobsian, dare I say.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> Quite Jobsian, dare I say._
|
| Good for product: not so good for people.
|
| I am told that he gave a great deal of agency to people he
| trusted, though.
|
| In my career, I ran into two [brilliant] individuals that
| had, at one time, worked with Jobs.
|
| They both _hated_ him.
| hebejebelus wrote:
| Man, I miss Wolfram Language. Once you've twisted your brain a
| little to grok its usage, it's such an incredibly high-value
| tool, especially for exploration and prototyping. I saw it more
| as a do-anything software tool for researchers rather than as a
| language aimed at programmers, so I put on a researcher hat and
| tried to forget everything I knew as a professional programmer,
| and had a few memorable seasons with it around 2016-2020. I
| remember calculating precisely which days of the year would cause
| the sunlight to pass through a window and some glass blocks in an
| internal wall, creating a beautiful light show indoors. It only
| took a couple of minutes to get a nice animated visualisation and
| a calendar.
|
| Nowadays I'd probably just ask Claude to figure it out for me,
| but pre LLMs, WL was the highest value tool for thought in my
| toolbox.
|
| (Edit: and they actually offer perpetual licenses!)
| ktpsns wrote:
| The power of the language came from the concise syntax (I liked
| it more then classical LISPs) with the huge library of
| Mathematica. When Python is "batteries included", Mathematica
| is "spaceship included".
|
| If this was open sourced, it had the potential to severely
| change the software/IT industry. As an expensive proprietary
| software however, it is deemed to stay a niche product mainly
| for academia.
| hebejebelus wrote:
| That's exactly the same analogy I used to use, although I
| said "nuclear reactor included" - spaceship is better, it
| implies less danger and more expanded horizons!
| themafia wrote:
| > As an expensive proprietary software however
|
| It's $195/year for a personal license. And only $75/year for
| students. Their licensing model is pretty broad.
| zorked wrote:
| It still creates a class of haves and have-nots which
| prevents forming a community.
|
| Plus you buy a version of it, and then someone else is on
| another version, and you don't have the same features, and
| the tiny community is fragmented.
| bborud wrote:
| Well, that doesn't sound too bad. But this is a high enough
| barrier for Mathematica to not see wide spread use.
|
| I don't remember what the pricing has been throughout the
| years. But I do remember that for some of the time I
| couldn't really afford Mathematica. And the license I
| wanted was also a bit too expensive to justify for a piece
| of software that only I would be using within an
| organization.
|
| Because it is also about enough other people around you not
| being able to justify the expense. And about companies not
| wanting to pay a lot of money for licenses so they can lock
| their computations into an ecosystem that is very small.
|
| Mathematica is, in the computing world, pretty irrelevant.
| And I'm being generous when I say "pretty": I have never
| encountered it in any job or even in academia. People know
| of it. They just don't use it for work.
|
| It would have been nice if the language and the runtime had
| been open source. But Wolfram didn't want to go in that
| direction. That's a perfectly fine choice to make. But it
| does mean that as a language, Mathematica will never be
| important. Nor will knowing how to program in it be a
| marketable skill.
|
| (To Stephen Wolfram it really doesn't matter. He obviously
| makes a good living. I'm not sure I'd bother with the noise
| and stress coming from open sourcing something)
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > And I'm being generous when I say "pretty": I have
| never encountered it in any job or even in academia.
| People know of it. They just don't use it for work.
|
| To my knowledge, at least in academia, Wolfram
| (Mathematica) seems to be used quite a bit by physicists.
| Also in some areas of mathematics it is used (but many
| mathematicians seems to prefer Maple). Concerning
| mathematical research, I want to mention that by now also
| some open-source (and often more specialized) CASs seem
| to have become more widespread, such as SageMath, SymPy,
| Macaulay2, GP/PARI or GAP.
| jjgreen wrote:
| In Maple sin(x) is "sin(x)", in Mathematica it's
| "Sin[x]", ewww
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| In my opinion, Wolfram/Mathematica is more consistent
| internally, while Maple is more consistent with the usual
| mathematical notation.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| > while Maple is more consistent with the usual
| mathematical notation
|
| I can't tell if you're saying that as if it's a good
| thing, or a bad thing.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| It's not about good nor bad, but about the different
| trade-offs that these two CASs made. What is more
| important for you is something that you can only answer
| for yourself.
| pmkary wrote:
| I actually loved this idea so much that every language I
| make, I try to do the same. The point of it is that
| typing ( requires shift, while [ does not. And you have
| no idea when you have tunnel syndrome, how much it hurts
| each time you write a (. While it's ugly, the hand thanks
| you for it.
| SSLy wrote:
| > _The point of it is that typing ( requires shift, while
| [ does not._
|
| https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xkeyboard-
| config/xkeyboard-co...
|
| Now, I really could've used something like this on
| macOS...
|
| Karabiner to the rescue
| https://genesy.github.io/karabiner-complex-rules-
| generator/#...
| esafak wrote:
| As everybody knows ...
| SSLy wrote:
| I use(d) arch btw
| zwaps wrote:
| Ironically, on ISO keyboards, [] need an ALT so even more
| pain
| andrewaylett wrote:
| I definitely get the impression that Wolfram builds his
| tools primarily for himself, and is happy to let other
| people play with them because that way he gets money to
| pay for them.
| pmkary wrote:
| That is not the impression, that is exactly why, And
| actually that is their strength. Back in the days the
| whole Apple was there to make software for Jobs and look
| how awesome that turned out. Wolfram is trying to
| complete tue work of Leibniz and create a universal
| calculus. A unifying language for symbolic computation,
| which is amazing.
| jwrallie wrote:
| I'd like to use it sporadically, but they charge a lot for
| people in academia, and for my use case it's simply not
| worth it.
|
| I'm using xcas now, it's working pretty well for my humble
| needs.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| It's also free on raspberry pi
| dataflow wrote:
| While I'm not sure the particular price point is the
| biggest problem here, the student license pricing doesn't
| feel seem that great either. The language is hard enough to
| learn, and most students won't have time to figure out if
| they want to buy it with a 15-day trial. They'd probably
| need half a semester at the very least, unless it's a
| required part of the curriculum. In the rare case where a
| student is already familiar enough to know they want it,
| then four years of $75/year is $300... at that point they
| may as well just pay $390 for a perpetual personal license,
| so they can at least keep opening their files in the
| future.
|
| That said, the parent was talking about it being expensive
| for use in industry. Personal and student licenses aren't
| relevant there.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Ok fuck it. Bought the year!
| analog31 wrote:
| My thought is that licenses were similarly cheap for
| historical programming tools like Turbo Pascal and Visual
| Basic. My dad got me Turbo Pascal for my birthday, for $39,
| after reading about it in the Wall Street Journal.
|
| But it seems like the proprietary languages have all
| withered, regardless of price. Even $195 for Mathematica is
| an obvious concession to this trend. I don't ever remember
| it being that cheap.
|
| I could write an essay on the benefits of free tooling, but
| enough has already been written. I'll spare you the slop.
| ;-)
| pjmlp wrote:
| As discussed on another thread, the outcome is poorly tools
| glued together, due to lack of roadmap and polish that
| commercial software usually supports, instead of volunteers
| coming and going, only caring for their little ich.
| wasmainiac wrote:
| I'm not sure about that. I used to use LabView and its
| various libraries often. The whole thing felt scattered and
| ossified. I'd take a python standard library any day.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yet most EE engineers rather use a graphical tool like
| LabView or Simulink.
|
| Not everyone is keen doing scripting from command line
| with vi.
| sallveburrpi wrote:
| Maybe it's different for those actually working in the
| profession and n=1 but in my (many) years of studying EE
| I never used these tools even once.
| amluto wrote:
| I once interned at a lab that used a piece of surely
| overpriced hardware that integrated with Simulink. You
| would make a Simulink model, and you'd click something
| and the computer would (IIRC) compile it to C and upload
| it to the hardware. On the bright side, you didn't waste
| time bikeshedding about how to structure things. On the
| other hand, actually implementing any sort of nontrivial
| logic was incredibly unpleasant.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Commercial software polish is lipstick on a pig. A pig that
| will never be anything else and will eventually die as a
| pig.
|
| Ugly os software at least has potential to grow internally.
| Long lived commercial software is a totting carcass with
| fresh coat of paint every now and then.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yet, the Year of XYZ software seldom comes, the usual
| cheering of tools like Blender, often forgets its origin
| as commercial product and existing userbase.
|
| Someone has to pay the bills for development effort, and
| when it based on volunteer work, it is mostly followers
| and not innovators.
| scotty79 wrote:
| There's nothing wrong with commercial software being the
| origin. What's a crime is that it can stay commercial.
| Source code should enter public domain in a decade at
| most.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > What's a crime is that it can stay commercial. Source
| code should enter public domain in a decade at most.
|
| In many cases, people are free to write their own
| implementation. Your claim "Source code should enter
| public domain in a decade at most." means that every
| software vendor shall be obliged after some time to hand
| out their source code, which is something very strong to
| ask for.
|
| What is the true crime are the laws that in some cases
| make such an own implementation illegal (software
| patents, probitions of reverse-engineering, ...).
| scotty79 wrote:
| > every software vendor shall be obliged after some time
| to hand out their source code,
|
| Obviously. Since software is as much vital to the modern
| world as water, making people who deal with it disclose
| implementation details is a very small ask.
|
| Access to the market is not a right but a privilege. If
| you want to sell things we can demand things of you.
| esafak wrote:
| You must design your own hardware too, since you can't
| get the blueprints of commercial products.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Fortunaley hardware designs are routinely reverse
| engineered and cloned. Imagine the world where industrial
| designs were as hard to reverse engineer as clone in
| practice as software. Global GDP would be 10% of what it
| is. Largest economies of the world owe lion share of
| their development to cloned designs.
| simonh wrote:
| I think commerce between individuals is a right.
|
| Infringing on that should be justified in terms of
| protecting the rights of those involved, such as ensuring
| the quality of goods, enforcement of reasonable contract
| terms and such. We are involved in the process as
| participants in the market, and that's the basis of any
| legitimacy we have to impose any rules in the market.
| That includes an obligation to fair treatment of other
| participants.
|
| If someone writes notes, procedures, a diary, software
| etc for their own use they are under no obligation to
| publish it, ever. That's basic privacy protection.
| Whether an executable was written from scratch in an
| assembler or is compiled from high level source code
| isn't anyone else's business. It should meet quality
| standards for commercial transactions and that's it.
| There's no more obligation to publish source than there
| is to publish design documents, early versions, or
| unpublished material. That would be an overreaching
| invasion of privacy.
| masfuerte wrote:
| So restrict the obligation to companies.
| simonh wrote:
| On what justification? You just want to take their stuff,
| because?
|
| People shouldn't lose their rights to what they own, just
| because they do so through a company.
|
| I do think reasonable taxation and regulation is
| justifiable but on the understanding that it is an
| imposition. There is a give and take when it comes to
| rights and obligations, but this seems like overreach.
| dataflow wrote:
| > Obviously. Since software is as much vital to the
| modern world as water, making people who deal with it
| disclose implementation details is a very small ask.
|
| The analogy would be ever-so-slightly more accurate if
| you said "software is as much vital to the modern world
| as beverages".
|
| It would also be more accurate if all water was free.
|
| Neither of which is the case.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Not everyone buys into FOSS religion, especially when
| there are bills to pay, and too many people feeling
| entitled to leech on work of others and being paid
| themselves, or companies for that matter.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Worse than lipstick on a pig is lipstick all the way
| down, with no pork, like the user interfaces coming out
| of Apple.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| To be fair, "sundry tools poorly glued together" describes
| CAS and symbolic computation software in general, including
| Maple or Mathematica. It's surprisingly difficult to put a
| proper formal foundation (guaranteeing the absence of
| "wrong" or even outright meaningless results) even on very
| basic symbolic manipulations.
| kingkongjaffa wrote:
| > If this was open sourced, it had the potential to severely
| change the software/IT industry.
|
| As an engineering undergrad I had a similar feeling about
| Matlab & Mathematica.
|
| Matlab especially had 'tool boxes' that you bought as add-ons
| to do specific engineering calcs and simulations and it was
| great, but I almost always found myself recreating things in
| python just because it felt slightly more sane to handle data
| and glue code.
|
| Pandas and Matplotlib and SciPy all used via an ipython
| notebook were almost a replacement.
| escanda wrote:
| Actually, Wolfram Language is based on Tiny Caml.
| M-expression based though. Lisps are neat and cosy too.
| YoshiRulz wrote:
| There is of course a FOSS rewrite https://mathics.org
| dr_kiszonka wrote:
| Interesting. I have always felt I am missing out on not using
| tools like Mathematica or MatLab. I see some people doing
| everything using MatLab, including building GUI and DL models,
| which I found surprising for a single software suite, and -
| nowadays - one that is quite affordable (at least the home
| edition).
|
| Mathematica seems a little pricey but maybe it would motivate
| me to learn more math.
|
| I would love to read what non-mathematicians use MatLab,
| Mathematica, and Maple for.
| hebejebelus wrote:
| I'm a non-mathematician and I used it for lots of novel stuff
| - GIS, visualisations of all kinds, machine learning. The
| Wolfram Community staff picks is a great introduction into
| the varied things you can do:
| https://community.wolfram.com/content?curTag=staff%20picks
| Keyframe wrote:
| I used mathematica for real last time in SGI days and loved
| it. I know probably a ton has changed since, but I do have to
| ask those that use it today if you'd still use it for non
| math-heavy (and even so) tasks if you have access to the
| wonderful world of python and jupyter / polars, R, and
| similar?
| gucci-on-fleek wrote:
| Mathematica is awesome for weird, one-off tasks in fields
| that I'm unfamiliar with, since the documentation is
| excellent, and the functionality is really broad (so I
| don't need to figure out how to install a specialty program
| for every one-off task). But for fields that I'm
| experienced with or tasks that I'm planning on running
| frequently, I'll usually just use Python, since most of the
| Python libraries have more functionality and run quicker
| than Mathematica.
|
| (Mathematica is of course much better than Python at
| symbolic math, but this isn't what you are asking about)
| 3abiton wrote:
| To be fair it was used a lot during my physics studies. I
| opted to use it afterwards for integrals and derivations,
| very powerful.
| auxiliarymoose wrote:
| Yeah, I was one of those schmucks that used sympy / python
| instead of mathematica in my physics coursework. Policy was
| "mathematica is recommended and supported, but you can
| bring your own tools if you want to and can make them
| work."
|
| In retrospect, doing the work in mathematica would have
| probably stretched my brain more (in a good way!) since it
| provides a different and powerful way of solving problems
| vs other languages...maybe I'll have to revisit it. Perhaps
| even try advent of code with it?
|
| While python did get the job done, it feels like the
| ceiling (especially for power users) is so much higher in
| mathematica.
| plomme wrote:
| MatLab was taught and used extensively at my university, and
| has many strong sides and a fantastic standard library. We
| used it mainly for physics and robotics calculations. The
| licenses are (were?) prohibitively expensive outside of
| academia though. Hard to compete with free Python + NumPy and
| a larger talent pool.
| azeemba wrote:
| Matlab and Mathematica are VERY different.
|
| Matlab and Python are in the same ballpark. Easy syntax and
| large standard library. Matlab provides a lot more dedicated
| libraries for niche areas but the overall experience feels
| the same.
|
| Mathematica doesn't really have a standard counterpart.
| Jupyter notebooks try to capture the experience but the
| support for symbolic expressions makes the Mathematica
| experience very different.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| I've had it installed on my laptop for over two decades, and I
| use it maybe once a year for actual work. Every time, it feels
| like cracking a walnut with a 500-ton press.
|
| Mathematica is way, _way_ under appreciated in industry, and
| even in the sciences.
| jwr wrote:
| > Nowadays I'd probably just ask Claude to figure it out for me
|
| Incidentally, Mathematica + LLMs make a great combination. If
| you take what is pretty much the biggest mathematical routine
| library in the world and combine it with interactive
| visualization tools, and then use an LLM to accelerate things,
| it becomes an incredible tool. Almost ridiculously powerful for
| trying things out, teaching, visualizing things, etc.
|
| (I've been using Mathematica since 1992 or so, so I'm familiar
| with the language, but it's still so much faster to just tell
| Claude to visualize this or that)
| rcarmo wrote:
| Huh. So Stephen finally discovered cloud computing (yes, I know
| about the hosted notebooks).
|
| I played around with RemoteKernel some time ago
| (https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2016/08/10/0830) but this is
| "better", although I wish they'd make it hostable in your own
| cloud provider like materials simulation software and other
| things we see running in HPC clusters. (I also ran Mathematica in
| a 512GB/128core VM once for kicks, but it's just not cost-
| effective).
| hebejebelus wrote:
| Just before I stopped using Mathematica they came out with that
| headless kernel, and I had wondered if you could spin it up on
| a Kubernetes cluster or something.
|
| I do notice that they have an "Application Server" for
| Kubernetes, which is pretty curious:
| https://github.com/WolframResearch/WAS-Kubernetes (though not
| updated in over a year)
| ThouYS wrote:
| the beauty of pure functions :)
| adius wrote:
| With all the integrated standard functions Mathematica is such an
| incredible tool. We really need an open source version of it.
| Even if we implement only 10% of the features it would be already
| incredible useful.
|
| I started working on an implementation in Rust called Woxi
| (https://github.com/ad-si/Woxi) and I hope to find some
| contributors, as it is such a gargantuan task!
| Y_Y wrote:
| Here's a 10% clone of Mathematica - https://mathics.org/
| babayega2 wrote:
| Maxima is the clone. I remember using it 20 years ago. very
| nice.
| pfortuny wrote:
| Maxima, despite its shortcomings, is a great tool for
| symbolic computation.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| It's more like both Mathematica and Maxima are clones of
| the original MACSYMA.
| Y_Y wrote:
| Maxima is a similar CAS, but it's not a clone of
| Mathematica like Mathics aims to be.
| Gave4655 wrote:
| imo you should implement double pass for the evaluator. using
| pest tokens in the functions etc makes it gard to implement
| also makes it slow and not optimizable
| robot-wrangler wrote:
| So "use our proprietary service to scale our proprietary
| language" is a great pitch for people who are already all in.
| Increasing spend among existing customers won't help you get new
| ones though. And it kind of feels like a prelude to nerfing non-
| cloud based usage.
|
| Typical example of a extraction/exploitation mentality where
| innovation would be better. Wolfram is in an amazingly good spot
| to spin up better "simulation as a service" if they would look at
| fine-tuning LLMs for compiling natural language (or academic
| papers) into mathematica semi-autonomously and very reliably.
| Mathworld is potentially a huge asset for that sort of thing too.
| pmkary wrote:
| Good point
| jwr wrote:
| I've been using Mathematica since 1992 or so and at least for the
| last 20 years I've been wondering why they didn't provide cloud
| computing services, so that I can simply evaluate stuff remotely
| on a larger computer. So, I guess I should say "FINALLY!" :-)
| cmiles8 wrote:
| The tech world needs more Stephan Wolframs.
|
| Yes this is all a bit quirky and nuanced but when you get into it
| these things are really good. It's refreshing to see some really
| smart folks just focused on doing great things without blinding
| from VCs and MBAs pushing another hacky quick way to make a buck
| and cash out.
| jebarker wrote:
| I agree. Wolfram gets so much crap ok this site but I think
| he's produced so much interesting science and tech that has
| built up over decades, that's very admirable.
| d_burfoot wrote:
| Do quant traders use Mathematica? I would guess this would be a
| great use case for a tool that lots of people love. Pretty
| language, huge boatload of built-in tools, high powered
| mathematics, great visualization capabilities. Quant firms should
| be able to live with the price tag. I assume they have a compiler
| that can produce fast executables for HFT.
| bob_theslob646 wrote:
| They do
| adamwong246 wrote:
| I'm slightly terrified of the combination of Wolfram and a LLM.
| beng-nl wrote:
| I'm not worried, wolfram is already a huge language model,
| adding a large one won't make it any better/worse :-)
| adamwong246 wrote:
| What I know about Wolfram is pretty old, so maybe I was
| unaware. But I do remember a time before LLMs and even 15
| years ago, Wolfram was very impressive.
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