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Yeah I think it looks impressive, and it's cool that it's been developed for like 30 years. The Matlab comparison isn't that useful though, because the languag
by chubot 11y ago
Yeah I think it looks impressive, and it's cool that it's been developed for like 30 years.
The Matlab comparison isn't that useful though, because the languages are geared toward different problems. Matlab at its core is linear algebra ("engineering"), while Mathematica is based on symbolic computation ("algebra"). That's a pretty huge difference. They have both branched out I'm sure, but the history remains.
People have a similar confusion over Matlab/Julia vs. R. They're both scientific computing, but R is for statistics. (R has matrices and linear algebra, though they are fairly terrible compared to the data frame operations, and seem second class.)
I would think of each language as having a core data structure:
1) Mathematica/Wolfram - expression/symbol
2) Matlab - matrix/vector
3) R - data frame (columns of heterogeneous type)
Julia is trying to subsume some of R, but it really is almost putting two different (but related) languages under one roof.
- bloaf 11y agohttp://12000.org/my_notes/rankTest/test.htm http://12000.org/my_notes/rankTest/test.htm Mathematica can get performance on par with Matlab. I think the real problem is that Mathematica's performance can feel inconsistent to beginners (i.e. some things are fast, some are slow, and why they are fast and slow is not at all obvious.)
- pirate_parrot 11y agoHmm I don't think that one can conclude much about the overall performance of either pieces of software by this "rank test". It's not exactly comprehensive, nor particularly practical.
- bloaf 11y agoThe benchmarks on http://julialang.org/ http://julialang.org/ have a few more.