12 ms·
Mathematica Version 12 Released
- dimitrov 8y agoI really think that Mathematica and Matlab failed to capitalize on the rise of AI and ML in the last decade. Seems like Python is the only go-to language these fields.
- tableofzero 8y agoMathematica has some great machine learning tools https://reference.wolfram.com/language/guide/MachineLearning.html https://reference.wolfram.com/language/guide/MachineLearning... it looks like the have added even more http://www.wolfram.com/language/new-in-12/ http://www.wolfram.com/language/new-in-12/
- marmaduke 8y agoIt has typical Keras net types and algos and nice interactive widgets for watching it run. It works on CUDA as well.
- layoutIfNeeded 8y agoThey’re proprietary, so it’s a good thing.
- nikofeyn 8y agoand python is a jumbled mess of versions, package managers, packages, distributions, etc. that isn't a good thing either.
- layoutIfNeeded 8y agoWhich perfectly illustrates how important being free and open source is. In spite of not having commercial support and versioning shenangians, people still choose Python over the commercial alternatives.
- jazzyjackson 8y agoI mean, since Wolfram is a valuable company it's clear plenty of people choose commercial software over their free alternatives
- 4ad 8y agoPeople use Mathematica and Python for completely different things. By and large they don't compete.
- 4thaccount 8y agoYes and No. If you ignore Python being a powerhouse in the scripting world and just focus on numerical stuff like matrix and symbolic math, both Python and Mathematica have that. Some people like myself that love Python and know how to use it and Numpy bought Mathematica licenses. I still use Python for scripting, but I've moved most exploratory work to Mathematica. I miss Python's Spyder IDE, but with Mathematica I can enter equations into Notebooks much more elegantly than having to do OO code which looks significantly different than the math.
- badsectoracula 8y agoThe vast majority of people want stuff for free, there isn't any grand reasoning beyond that for choosing Python.
- stabbles 8y agoJulia is a great choice as well: https://julialang.org/blog/2018/12/ml-language-compiler https://julialang.org/blog/2018/12/ml-language-compiler
- thanatropism 8y agoIt's a winner-take-it-all situation, though. R is already struggling as a strong second-placer. What's more: the numerics stack in JavaScript is being modeled after the Python style, so when we're all dragged kicking and screaming to node (UMAP is already implemented in js and that came out when?), those who have cut their teeth on numpy and pandas will be a little less stranded.
- copperx 8y agoI encourage everyone to watch at least one of the many livestreams[1] that Stephen Wolfram did while putting together this release. They changed my perception of Stephen, which I had gotten from the critiques of him that are everywhere on the internet. He is perpetually obsessed with his creation and does not accept mediocrity from his developers; but does so without attacking or belittling anyone, or feeling superior and being condescending, which I thought was his "thing" from what I had read. He might still have that adolescent ego, and in his blog posts he still comes across as self-obsessed; but in his livestreams he comes across as a decent human. [1]: https://www.stephenwolfram.com/livestreams/ https://www.stephenwolfram.com/livestreams/
- wrthrowaway 8y agoI am a current employee of Wolfram Research and created an account just to say how very wrong this is. He literally yelled at an ex-employee so hard they went into labor. He is utterly convinced that everyone around him is an idiot, and that one day the world will realize how wrong they were about his ideology and dedicate museums to his honor, etc. He even compared himself to a Greek god in one of his meetings. He's definitely the kind of person that wouldn't dare scream at someone in real life, but will gladly tell you how much of a PoS you are in the middle of a meeting with a dozen other people. My fellow employees (except for the hard core brown-nosers) are the most kind and intelligent people I've had the pleasure of working with. They are the true geniuses being this release. SW is the tyrant that the rest of the company is trying to fight.
- copperx 8y agoIn the livestreams he says things like "this is stupid", or "what the heck is this?", but I have never heard him say "YOU are stupid". Is he acting differently than normal in his livestreams? Also, one thing that I found a bit troubling is that the employees generally sound terrified, but I've had bosses who were great AND terrifying at the same time, so I have given Wolfram the benefit of the doubt. > He's definitely the kind of person that wouldn't dare scream at someone in real life. What do you mean exactly here, given that in the paragraph above you said he screamed at an employee so hard she went into labor? > He is utterly convinced that everyone around him is an idiot, and that one day the world will realize how wrong they were about his ideology and dedicate museums to his honor, etc. Is that something that he has said, or is it hyperbole?
- mirekrusin 8y agoI know I'm dreaming, Stephen is rather on the opposite side, but if he would open source it all/most of it, he'd be one of the most famous people around. I wonder how he'd move financially wise with that kind of bold move?
- maliker 8y agoSeems like he's far from open sourcing it. His team just published a long blog post (https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-open-source-a-dozen-reasons/ https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-op...) explaining why they're closed source.
- enriquto 8y agowow, I was expecting an intelligent list of reasons why he cannot explain how mathematica works internally (I'm sure there are many). Instead, this post is a ridiculous strawman argument against the open development model. For all the reasons he says, he could perfectly publish the source code of mathematica (e.g. under the AGPL) but still do not accept external pull requests. There are many successful open-source/closed-development projects out there.
- gmiller123456 8y agoI think you misinterpreted his point. It's not that he can't give Mathematica away as it stands now. His point is more that Mathematica couldn't be developed as a free and open project with just contributions from random people. The point he doesn't mention is that it costs money to develop it closed source, and giving away the source (or even the binary) would cut off funding. I'm obliged to agree with him, since there isn't anything free that comes close to Mathematica.
- carlob 8y agoHonestly I read most of those reasons as reasons for not being free and community-driven as opposed to not being open-source, and also more as a post-hoc justification than a prediction on what will happen in the future. As a matter of fact a large part of the Mathematica codebase is inspectable (the part that is written in Mathematica itself) [1]. Disclaimer: I'm a Wolfram employee, but these are my opinions and any decision on open sourcing the language would be way above my pay grade. [1] https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/1742/what-is-the-most-convenient-way-to-read-definitions-of-in-memory-symbols-when-we https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/1742/what-is...
- mschuetz 8y agoMight seem dumb but the thing that drove me away from Mathematica are the stylesheets. Mathematica used to have a useful stylesheet that visibly separated input, output and text content. But at some point, I think version 8 or 9, they removed that stylesheet. All the remaining stylesheets either don't properly distinguish input and output, or look like crap. I lost interest in reinstalling that stylesheet whenever I had to install Mathematica on a new system and consequently, I lost interest in Mathematica. Wish they'd reintroduce it as an easily selectable default sheet. Jupyter has a much better default stylesheet but Jupyter lacks ease of use and functionality. Edit: The stylesheet I'm talking about was called NaturalColor and there even is a stackexchange thread about its disappearance. https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/17323/did-mathematica-9-remove-some-previously-available-stylesheets https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/17323/did-ma...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- chobytes 8y agoReally excited to try the new SQL interface. The old one was less than pleasant to work with. The Unity stuff is kind of unexpected and I’m curious to try that out too. ...Now I just have to see if my student license lets me upgrade...
- carlob 8y ago> Really excited to try the new SQL interface. The old one was less than pleasant to work with. Cool! I hope people find it useful, that's where most of my past year and a half went :)
- marmaduke 8y agoMaybe you can’t comment but it was neat (and huge time saver)to see something like sqlalchemy’s reflection.
- carlob 8y agoActually we use sqlalchemy internally for the backend-specific code generation
- 4thaccount 8y agoThanks for the hard work in the Mathematica SQL area. I know y'all have lots and lots of database documentation, but I've had trouble commenting from Mathematica to Oracle via ODBC. It's a tad confusing, but I'm sure I'm doing something simple wrong. In R, this was really easy, but surprisingly complicated in Mathematica. Do y'all have any kind of step by step doc in that arena? SQLite was of course easy, but I think Oracle requires the use of JDBC with Mathematica and that's where I get lost.
- thomasahle 8y ago> nowadays the vast majority of what the Wolfram Language (and Mathematica) does isn’t what’s usually considered math I wonder how much of actual Mathematica use is outside of mathematics. The new AsymptoticSum and AsymptoticSolve functions sound useful though!
- arnoud-buzing 8y agoIt's used in more places than you'd think, e.g. Alexa: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18726804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18726804
- thomasahle 8y agoSeems AsymptoticSum still can't solve many really simple sums though, like AsymptoticSum[Binomial[n,k],{k,0,n/3},{n,Infinity,1}] Will still have to that by hand I guess :(
- phonon 8y agoStill don't understand why they don't have a good JSON REST API story. It's like they have no expectation of Mathematica ever being useful in a server based production environment.
- carlob 8y agoCare to elaborate? I was one of the developers behind APIFunction and GenerateHTTPResponse. If you are you talking about the ability to deploy a REST API to our cloud I think you are wrong and I'd be happy to show you how.
- phonon 8y agoI don't want to use the Wolfram cloud. I have no interest in tracking number of monthly API calls. Say I wrote a nice notebook that does a bunch of useful things. What's an easy way to deploy it on a server and connect to it with a REST API? It takes me a few minutes to do it with Python using Chalice and AWS Lambda. I'm also not a fan of the primitive URL query syntax. Why isn't there a way to generate an OpenAPI? A schema?
- carlob 8y agoI absolutely feel your pain. As a matter of fact I've been lobbying internally for a refresh of webMathematica for years. Maybe something is going to come out in the near future. Please hold on :)
- marmaduke 8y agoI would second this, there’s no way I can deploy APIs to your cloud and meet compliance requirements for data protection.
- phonon 8y agoI was hoping there would be a big API rethink in this area for version 12 :-( What I don't get, is that long term, making Mathematica useful for actual server based production environments would open up an order of magnitude larger revenue stream. Yet all I see is a fragmented, difficult to use/understand/license environment. There seem to be a dozen, slightly different initiatives, some basically unmaintained. I mean, what the heck is all this? https://www.wolfram.com/engine/ https://www.wolfram.com/engine/ I should seamlessly be able to prototype something through the notebook interface, and then deploy it, in a standard generic way, and on a server I control, that can be consumed by anyone who can read through a OpenAPI (with auto generated docs and schemas). Setting Alpha aside, what you seem to offer is a) a prototyping/notebook environment, like Jupyter (yes, I know you came first) b) a programming language tightly coupled with a really nice stdlib The programming language itself, realistically, has no use outside your libraries. And there seem to be very little third party Mathematica libraries. The notebook environment is only useful for prototyping. So the market you should want to grow into, is, "How do we allow people to build something really easily, and then deploy really simply, in their own server/DB environment, with reasonably standard API interfaces?". The attempts to integrate with Python are a good start, but seem to be more focused on the prototyping aspects. Something like https://www.django-rest-framework.org/ https://www.django-rest-framework.org/ should be built in.
- cogs 8y agoI like Mathematica a lot, and I'm happy to see the client library for Python. What it really needs though is a decent debugger. I'd upgrade today if this release had one. I think the people at Wolfram and heavyweight Wolfram Language users use Eclipse - which provides support for debugging. Though running with Eclipse in one window and Notebook in another is a bit of a dogs dinner. In the Notebook environment I found the current debugging functionality to be pretty terrible. The GUI needs to work much more like a modern IDE, to support easy single stepping, inspection and editing of values, so us mere mortals can figure out what is going wrong when results aren't what you expect (and this is half of what programming is, after all). In fact it might provide that somewhere among the layers of complexity of its meta-debugging whatnots. But I never figured it out, and really I shouldn't have to be fighting complexity when I'm just trying to find out why my program isn't working. A decent debugger would help us understand the product better than any number of new documentation functions.
- jakobegger 8y agoI wish Mathematica was more affordable. I loved using it as a student, but now I can no longer afford it. A professional license costs 3500€. Which is probably worth it if you use it every day, but not so much if you just use it just once a month to make a graph or integrate something. They have a "hobby" license for 350€, which is reasonable, but according to their license it can't be used for anything work related. I think this is an issue with a lot of professional software. It's priced for heavy users and if you are just an occasional user, you are out of luck.
- JorgeGT 8y agoThere's always Mathematica for the Raspberry Pi, completely free for personal use! https://www.wolfram.com/raspberry-pi/ https://www.wolfram.com/raspberry-pi/
- jakobegger 8y agoI would want to use Mathematica for work related stuff, though.
- gregschlom 8y agoWell then maybe your company can afford it, no? (Unless you're a bootstrapping startup, of course)
- AlotOfReading 8y agoI suspect many people are in the same position I am. I like the tool and occasionally wish I had a copy at work, but the problems I would use it on are infrequent and/or peripheral to my actual job. It's hard to justify burning the social capital for an 'occasional' nicety.
- jakobegger 8y agoMy company isn't going to pay 3500€ for a tool that I don't really need.
- jwr 8y agoMathematica is a great tool. But in my case, there are two huge pain points which limit my use of Mathematica: 1. Horrible REPL experience. Yes, the notebook interface can display graphics, cool. But I would take Emacs with paredit over it any day. After structurally manipulating Clojure code in Emacs with paredit, using the Mathematica interface is like a throwback to the 70s. You mean I need to balance and match my parentheses myself?! Seriously? Debugging larger expressions is like stabbing yourself in the eye with a dull spoon. 2. Badly designed data structures, specifically maps (also known as hashes or associative arrays). This is the most universal data structure, that can be used for almost anything, storing mappings from keys to values. Using maps in Mathematica is awkward and feels like doing precision watchwork in boxing gloves. I don't know why this doesn't get more love, after all if all your data fits in a matrix, Matlab is the competing tool, so better data structures would let Mathematica get a nice competitive advantage. If these two areas were improved, I would likely subscribe to Mathematica and use it much more.
- wemdyjreichert 8y agoI think you may not be the target market. A lower-level option is often more powerful, but carries added complexity and a steeper learning curve. It is my understanding that Mathematica is more valued in academic settings where not everyone wants to deal with learning Clojure. Many poor people rent furniture rather than buying because it's not feasible to muster the initial investment, and must continue doing it in spite of the long-term loss. The same is true here: not everyone uses Clojure over Mathematica because many cannot find the large chunk of time to learn it, though its use may produce a net gain of time long-term. > Using maps in Mathematica is awkward and feels like doing precision watchwork in boxing gloves. Can you elaborate a bit more on this? I haven't used it before.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- occamschainsaw 8y agoMy experience has been the opposite of this. Mathematica/Wolfram lang seems to be a much more functional(as in paradigm) language, because of anonymous/lambda functions and “Tables”. Even loops are discouraged. I use it for math/science stuff and I am delighted every now and then when I figure out how to use mappings in a smart and concise way. My coding style in Python changed quite a bit after learning Mathematica. However, I am not a professional coder so take this comment with a rock of salt.
- xvilka 8y agoIt is better to focus on Octave, SageMath, SciPy, and Julia instead. Or to donate corresponding projects instead of buying a license of Mathematica. Of course it is an amazing software, but science, especially the core one - mathematics, should be open for everyone.
- JustFinishedBSG 8y agoMathematica is really one of these tools I have zero use for but wish I did. It's such an amazing accomplishment.
- armitron 8y agoI know Lisp and more specifically, Lisp machines, have greatly influenced Mathematica but when I read that Wolfram is using Mathematica as a computer shell I can't help but think that he's taken the Symbolics Genera paradigm and ran with it. I'm certainly happy about that since nobody else seems to have realized how well it fits in with the current era of having to deal with ever-increasing information flows in disparate domains. But I'm also regretting that Mathematica is not opensource since I'm convinced this constitutes a great barrier that the vast majority of programmers today will not attempt to cross.