4 ms·

I briefly tried using it a couple of weeks ago, when there was a post here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29406322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2

by svat 5y ago

I briefly tried using it a couple of weeks ago, when there was a post here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29406322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29406322) about it. I took a small notebook I had made in Colab: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1FqJomu3MAWLz_Dc2y15QtqlYjIiPK4yF https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1FqJomu3MAWLz_Dc2y15... and tried converting it to Wolfram Cloud: https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/shreevatsapublic/Published/Squareful.nb https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/shreevatsapublic/Published/... Pros: The Wolfram / Mathematica language, once you learn it, is likely to be consistent and powerful. (Browse some questions on https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/ https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/) Cons: Mostly around familiarity and ubiquity, versus a closed ecosystem. For example, it took me a long time to figure out how to put everything into the Wolfram language (imperative things are awkward to do; had to figure out how `Do` and `Module` work), there are fewer resources for learning it, etc. Can't use standard Markdown, nor TeX syntax for math[1] AFAIK. There may be an alternative way to typeset mathematics; I never got around to it. The UI is unfamiliar to me (harder to see where the cells are, deleting a cell was nontrivial to figure out). Maybe with time it will become easier, but overall, I expect to continue to use Jupyter / Colab notebooks when they work well enough, and try Wolfram Cloud again when I want something really nontrivial that sympy / Sage / etc can't do cleanly… which is probably unlikely, as the Python ecosystem continues to close the gap. ([1]: Aside: Did you know that MathML came into existence, with impetus from Wolfram, to make it harder to use TeX/LaTeX syntax for math on the web? See https://www.mathmlcentral.com/history.html#:~:text=To%20head%20off%20this%20possibility https://www.mathmlcentral.com/history.html#:~:text=To%20head... )

searke 5y ago
(disclaimer, I work at Wolfram Research) I'd love more tools for using TeX and markdown. There are a few but they're not really given as a first choice anywhere. About MathML... I mean I'm also not a fan. I'm not sure anyone really is. I've been cursed to work with it in some legacy pages. I love using mathjax. I'm not familiar at all with the two people who from the company who worked on it or that project. But I think it's going a bit far to think that MathML was nefarious corporate plot to manipulate the W3C. (0) MathML doesn't interoperate with WolframLanguage in any particularly great or exclusive way. (1) MathML makes more sense for the time period it was introduced than it does now. Mathjax is technology I don't think people foresaw at the time (Reparsing the DOM and injecting some kind of formatted math notation?!) People really thought math notation would need to be expressed in an XML like format. The other option at the time afaik was static images you'd generate from LaTeX and insert into your document. (2) TeX is a language for typesetting math in a paper and people thought we'd need something that went deeper, representing something closer to the intended semantics of the notation. This was probably a mistake. Afaik MathML didn't make it harder for people to use TeX on the web.
- svat 5y ago
  Oh yes, definitely, I didn't mean that MathML was a nefarious corporate plot. Just that there's a tension between pragmatists and idealists: in this case those who just want to put math on the web for the common case in any way at all (images, MathJax, whatever works), and those who think/thought that semantics should be encoded, just as you said. (That's what the page I linked says too: "There was a danger during the 1990s that a standard would emerge for mathematical representation on the web that would be based on a TeX[…]-like typesetting language. This would have been disastrous […] To head off this possibility, Wolfram Research and Neil Soiffer decided to do everything they could to […]" etc.) This tension has played out a few times in practice, e.g. when Wikipedia removed the (added in 2012) MathJax option and went back to images-only (2016? https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T99369 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T99369) based to a large extent on arguments from people who are (still) MathML proponents (which I understand Wolfram may not be any more) — at least some of them are "semantic" advocates who believe in "structured" math input rather than "presentation" markup. So there's some conflict there. (Anyway, this is all historical and unrelated to Wolfram Cloud.)

by svat 5y ago

searke 5y ago

(disclaimer, I work at Wolfram Research) I'd love more tools for using TeX and markdown. There are a few but they're not really given as a first choice anywhere. About MathML... I mean I'm also not a fan. I'm not sure anyone really is. I've been cursed to work with it in some legacy pages. I love using mathjax. I'm not familiar at all with the two people who from the company who worked on it or that project. But I think it's going a bit far to think that MathML was nefarious corporate plot to manipulate the W3C. (0) MathML doesn't interoperate with WolframLanguage in any particularly great or exclusive way. (1) MathML makes more sense for the time period it was introduced than it does now. Mathjax is technology I don't think people foresaw at the time (Reparsing the DOM and injecting some kind of formatted math notation?!) People really thought math notation would need to be expressed in an XML like format. The other option at the time afaik was static images you'd generate from LaTeX and insert into your document. (2) TeX is a language for typesetting math in a paper and people thought we'd need something that went deeper, representing something closer to the intended semantics of the notation. This was probably a mistake. Afaik MathML didn't make it harder for people to use TeX on the web.

svat 5y ago
Oh yes, definitely, I didn't mean that MathML was a nefarious corporate plot. Just that there's a tension between pragmatists and idealists: in this case those who just want to put math on the web for the common case in any way at all (images, MathJax, whatever works), and those who think/thought that semantics should be encoded, just as you said. (That's what the page I linked says too: "There was a danger during the 1990s that a standard would emerge for mathematical representation on the web that would be based on a TeX[…]-like typesetting language. This would have been disastrous […] To head off this possibility, Wolfram Research and Neil Soiffer decided to do everything they could to […]" etc.) This tension has played out a few times in practice, e.g. when Wikipedia removed the (added in 2012) MathJax option and went back to images-only (2016? https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T99369 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T99369) based to a large extent on arguments from people who are (still) MathML proponents (which I understand Wolfram may not be any more) — at least some of them are "semantic" advocates who believe in "structured" math input rather than "presentation" markup. So there's some conflict there. (Anyway, this is all historical and unrelated to Wolfram Cloud.)