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I feel like claims that Mathematica is dying fall in the same category as people who claim that Apple must be dying because hardly anyone uses Macs compared to

I feel like claims that Mathematica is dying fall in the same category as people who claim that Apple must be dying because hardly anyone uses Macs compared to PC’s, and they don’t even have the majority of the mobile or tablet market. All the while they are reaching the first 3T market cap. Mathematica isn’t trying to be the cheap solution that everyone used, it’s the expensive but extremely high quality product that’s only used by those who are willing to pay. And they are doing quite well financially.

physicsguy 5y ago
Well, I deploy software on a national HPC cluster and a University level one at a research intensive University in the UK, so if people on those aren’t using it on those machines anymore then it’s a fair indication that it’s losing market share…
- boublepop 5y ago
  Yes, and you could be a sysadmin at a university commenting on the dwindling share of Macs on campus arguing that it proves Apple is becoming irrelevant…
- freemint 5y ago
  Using Mathematica on HPC is an odd notion. Mathematica's primary mode of interaction is in Notebooks (in fact you can get almost every other capability of Mathematics for free when using WolframScript and make it talk to to a Jupyter notebook. You are kinda concluding Python is dying because nobody runs in HPC iPython notebooks. Mathematica notebooks are used work with symbolic problems more often than not. HPC is more numerical. If someone uses Mathematica to check equations, looks up solutions to ODEs, or calculates a Jacobian which gets implemented in code you will never hear people say they used Mathematica for it.
  - physicsguy 5y ago
    > You are kinda concluding Python is dying because nobody runs in HPC iPython notebooks. By far the largest number of users (not core hours) on both of HPC systems I manage are using Python or R. A lot of them use Jupyter and RStudio through an OpenStack instance. So they're using exactly the sort of notebook interface you're talking about, coupled to 40/72 core nodes with 256/512gb of RAM. I'm well aware of what Mathematica is capable of, I made use of it for all sorts of things in my research career. I used it a lot for generating input configurations for molecular dynamics simulations, plotting, symbolic algebra, generating Voronoi diagrams in post-processing of simulation data and more. All of that ran on a HPC cluster as part of the pipelines.
    - brnt 5y ago
      I know Mathematica as the go-to tool for mathmaticians and theoretical physicists trying to work their way through proofs. HPC doesn't come into that game (performance isn't an issue), and frankly I didn't even know it could! Nobody used it for any heavy computational work.
    - freemint 5y ago
      Mhh, seems to be a culture thing. Out of curiosity what work scheduler do you use at that HPC center?
      - physicsguy 5y ago
        We use SLURM

physicsguy 5y ago

Well, I deploy software on a national HPC cluster and a University level one at a research intensive University in the UK, so if people on those aren’t using it on those machines anymore then it’s a fair indication that it’s losing market share…

boublepop 5y ago
Yes, and you could be a sysadmin at a university commenting on the dwindling share of Macs on campus arguing that it proves Apple is becoming irrelevant…
freemint 5y ago
Using Mathematica on HPC is an odd notion. Mathematica's primary mode of interaction is in Notebooks (in fact you can get almost every other capability of Mathematics for free when using WolframScript and make it talk to to a Jupyter notebook. You are kinda concluding Python is dying because nobody runs in HPC iPython notebooks. Mathematica notebooks are used work with symbolic problems more often than not. HPC is more numerical. If someone uses Mathematica to check equations, looks up solutions to ODEs, or calculates a Jacobian which gets implemented in code you will never hear people say they used Mathematica for it.
- physicsguy 5y ago
  > You are kinda concluding Python is dying because nobody runs in HPC iPython notebooks. By far the largest number of users (not core hours) on both of HPC systems I manage are using Python or R. A lot of them use Jupyter and RStudio through an OpenStack instance. So they're using exactly the sort of notebook interface you're talking about, coupled to 40/72 core nodes with 256/512gb of RAM. I'm well aware of what Mathematica is capable of, I made use of it for all sorts of things in my research career. I used it a lot for generating input configurations for molecular dynamics simulations, plotting, symbolic algebra, generating Voronoi diagrams in post-processing of simulation data and more. All of that ran on a HPC cluster as part of the pipelines.
  - brnt 5y ago
    I know Mathematica as the go-to tool for mathmaticians and theoretical physicists trying to work their way through proofs. HPC doesn't come into that game (performance isn't an issue), and frankly I didn't even know it could! Nobody used it for any heavy computational work.
  - freemint 5y ago
    Mhh, seems to be a culture thing. Out of curiosity what work scheduler do you use at that HPC center?
    - physicsguy 5y ago
      We use SLURM