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There was a time before Mathematica (2013)
- daly 5y agoWow. This "history" misses a LOT of other major efforts, muMath (Rich and Stoutemyer), Derive (Rich and Stoutemyer), Maple (Geddes and Labahn), Axiom (Griesmer and Jenks), SageMath (Stein), etc.
- verytrivial 5y agoderive.exe was like a super power in highschool.
- Upvoter33 5y agoIf you have read anything about Wolfram, you'd be less surprised. Brilliant, but perhaps not so careful about related work. See http://shell.cas.usf.edu/~wclark/ANKOS_reviews.html http://shell.cas.usf.edu/~wclark/ANKOS_reviews.html for more ...
- yaseer 5y agoYes, whilst I admire Wolfram's work, he combines hubris (e.g. Claiming to reinvent science[0]), with a tendency to ignore the work of others [1]. Hubris aside, he's not a conventional thinker, and I found his personal setup interesting [2]. [0] https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/ https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Kind_of_Science#Originality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Kind_of_Science#Original... [2] https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2019/02/seeking-the-productive-life-some-details-of-my-personal-infrastructure/ https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2019/02/seeking-the-prod...
- spoonjim 5y agoI feel like he’s a decent guy with some kind of psychological disorder that makes him very unaware of the line between proper Western self-regard and very unbecoming arrogance.
- belugacat 5y agoHe’s had tremendous success and impact through the work that his outlook on the world enabled. I can’t see how there’d be any incentive to update one’s self view in those circumstances.
- lioeters 5y ago> A New Kind of Review - by "a reader" > I can only imagine how fortunate you must feel to be reading my review. This review is the product of my lifetime of experience in meeting important people and thinking deep thoughts. This is a new kind of review, and will no doubt influence the way you think about the world around you and the way you think of yourself.
- parenthesis 5y agoand Macsyma/Maxima
- ModernMech 5y agoWolfram is an egoist of the highest order. Even Linus Torvalds had the good sense not go full ego and call his OS “Linus”. PL designers have huge egos in general, often referring to themselves as benevolent dictators over their project. But most language authors name their language after a clever pun, a famous person in the field, or a loved one. Not Wolfram though, he named his language after himself — really takes it to a next level.
- 0xcde4c3db 5y ago> Even Linus Torvalds had the good sense not go full ego and call his OS “Linus”. Allegedly, Linus was going to call it "Freax", but a FUNET admin hated that name and forced the issue by naming the directory "linux".
- ModernMech 5y agoCould you imagine? As if Linux doesn't have enough trouble finding mainstream support as it is, imagine if it were called Freax. My God nerds suck at marketing, and I mean that with so much love. I guess marketing types suck at writing operating systems, so it's unfair to expect the world from one guy.
- Nevermark 5y agoIf I manage to create a successful computing ecosystem, I plan to name myself after it. :)
- retzkek 5y agoI believe he truly sees the Wolfram language as an extension of himself, from the very beginning it was designed only based on his needs and desires. That others find it useful is just a happy accident. Maybe it is just ego, or maybe it's something a bit more profound.
- ModernMech 5y agoTbf that’s the standard for many pl projects. It’s why so many anoint themselves as bdfl; they don’t want to lose control over the project and find themselves unable to execute their visions. Many PLs start with one developer saying to themself “this tool suck, I could do it better.” What follows is an endeavor of so much breadth and depth it takes many years to execute on that vision, so pl designers become very attached to them. This is why there are a billion languages with only a single user: the designer.
- henrydark 5y agoAlso magma and pari/gp had, and still have, their place
- williamstein 5y agoBoth are still at least a decade ahead of Mathematica at arithmetic geometry and group theory.
- wslh 5y agoYes Derive [1]. I remember Derive doing equations... Isolating variables for me was pure AI. Even if now AI is more about deep learning more than expression manipulations. Z3 [2] gave me a similar impression In my adulthood with Sudoku creations. Never Prolog . [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derive_%28computer_algebra_system%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derive_%28computer_algebra_sys... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_Theorem_Prover https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_Theorem_Prover
- leephillips 5y agoThat’s a well-known pattern with this author, which is why I’m not going to bother reading this, despite having an interest in the technology.
- smaddox 5y agoWhy should a memoir about Mathematica talk about other products?
- jelly 5y agoIts about "a time before Mathematica" and it does talk about other products.
- systemBuilder 5y agoWolfram is a blowhard with an ego too large for hyperspace. I remember attending a rambling lecture at the UIUC Beckman institute on his "new kind of science" topic with no interesting results and at the end of 65 minutes he said, "Are there any questions?" and everyone just stood up and began filing out of the room and Wolfram became irate, and began complaining that nobody had any questions - we had learned nothing at all.
- spyremeown 5y agoAny of you guys mind sharing your experiences and use cases for Mathematica? I have yet to see someone using it in the wild.
- ocschwar 5y agoMy master's thesis involved figuring out an integration of the Biot Savart equation for hexagonal finite elements. Without Mathematica it would have been impossible.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- fsh 5y agoIn my experience, Mathematica is probably the best software available for symbolic computations (integrals, derivatives, equation solving,...). The numerical capabilities are alright, but specialized libraries in compiled languages usually perform a lot better. Plotting is absolutely terrible compared to matplotlib.
- gertlex 5y agoI solely used it in college, but heavily. I'm content with Python now. I never got into making my Mathematica notebooks super presentable, but I think Jupyter notebooks also fill that need really well now. Noteworthy projects: * Visualizing linkages in a car steering system, and then brute-force iterating on lengths of components to reduce bump-steer * Illustrating nuclear reactor core layouts (fuel rods, control rods) using "plotted" hexagons. I think I subsequently animated this to illustrate... something (Bummer I don't use my nuclear engineering learnings anymore). But in general, it was just a great tool at the time for engineering-oriented calculations and graphs. Matlab's syntax never appealed to me. Oh, and my absolute favorite thing was the interactive documentation that Mathematica had. Made trying new things super easy; search the docs, modify the snippet, and now you understand it!
- jcims 5y agoI’ll never forget the first time I encountered Mathematica. It was 30 years ago in a NeXT lab in the basement of a building at Ohio State University. I had spent the previous two years tinkering with a junky 486 on a 14” monitor. The NeXT platform alone seemed almost magical and the things i could do with Mathematica just blew my young mind. I would spend hours in there just messing around with it. They also had laser printers in that lab, another technology that I just couldn’t wrap my head around. I had entered school thinking I was going to become a mechanical engineer and design cars and motorcycles. I think that lab was instrumental in me pivoting to a career working with computers.
- jfb 5y agoYou don't say, Steve.
- mikexstudios 5y agoLater down the page, Wolfram issues a challenge: "It’s been years now, and I’d really like to see SMP run again. So here’s a challenge. This is the source for a C program encrypted like the SMP source code..." Just wanted to call this out in case anyone wanted to try decrypting it :).
- spoonjim 5y agoMathematica is one of the greatest software applications of all time but hearing Wolfram talk about it will make you throw up in your mouth
- tonyedgecombe 5y agoFeynman's understood him: http://genius.cat-v.org/richard-feynman/writtings/letters/wolfram http://genius.cat-v.org/richard-feynman/writtings/letters/wo...
- blast 5y agoIt's a fascinating letter, but Feynman's prediction didn't come true. Wolfram did succeed in running a company.
- JBits 5y agoI would argue the opposite, that it did in fact come true, since Wolfram's attempts at research while running a company (A New Kind of Science and Wolfram Physics) are all unsuccessful.
- spoonjim 5y agoI think Wolfram’s impact has been in a mind multiplier for Mathematica customers. It’s a legacy to be proud of. The software makes my brain more capable.
- The_rationalist 5y ago
- henrydark 5y agoI remember using Mathematica in early 2000's, alongside maple, with warez copies found on kazaa, and how hard it was to reconcile programming languages I was familiar with these technologies, and how I could never create a serious project with them. Then sage came out, and everything changed.
- williamstein 5y agoSame.
- mmmBacon 5y agoMathematica is cool but I haven’t found much of a space for it in my career. As a physics student I think I used it a total of one time to help solve a difficult integration that I couldn’t find in Gradshteyn and Ryzhik. In my professional life, I’ve tended to solve things numerically first with Matlab, then with Python and Numpy. Mathematica is still a cool tool.
- burntoutfire 5y ago+1. It's perhaps a good tool for pure mathematicians or theoretical physicists, but applied problems are usually to messy to nicely integrate/differentiate and you quickly have to resort to numeric methods or, more recently, to automatic differentiation. I for one bought the licence and was later very disappointed by how useless the tool was for the domain I intented to use it for (computer vision/3d reconstruction/SLAM).
- s0rce 5y agoI've been using it for 20 years and really like the ability to quickly analyze data. Mostly, I'm just used to the style and with a bit more practice could probably do these things in Python. I've occasionally also used it for difficult integrals. I really do like their documentation compared to what is most often available for Python packages.
- leephillips 5y agoThe problem with using it in research is that it’s a black box. This is not good for transparency or reproducibility. Science is moving toward open-source tools, open data, etc. for good reason.
- jiggawatts 5y agoIt’s still significantly better in practice than, say, Python where you need to resort to containers to have any hope of another person being able to run your data science stack successfully. Mathematica has this perception of being a black box, but much of its algorithms actually ship as plain text libraries. Its design also makes it trivial to cross-check results calculated with different algorithms. Their algorithms are also designed to be robust to numerical errors, and are professionally verified against various sources such as textbooks and research papers. Worse is better: people prefer to duct-tape random maths libraries together with Python from the Internet not because it’s better but because they feel more involved in the process. Even if Wolfram open-sourced Mathematica tomorrow, nothing would change.
- Tabular-Iceberg 5y agoI used it to cheat on my algebra homework in high school. Of course it left me wholly unprepared for the actual test. There’s a lot of talk about the need to introduce programming in schools. Why not teach it as a way to automate tedious schoolwork? Implementing a basic computer algebra system should do just as good of a job teaching the principles of algebra as anything.
- dang 5y agoRelated: There Was a Time before Mathematica (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19224383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19224383 - Feb 2019 (56 comments) There Was a Time Before Mathematica … - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14852454 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14852454 - July 2017 (1 comment) The time before Mathematica (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10142496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10142496 - Aug 2015 (10 comments) There Was a Time before Mathematica - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5834731 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5834731 - June 2013 (39 comments)
- lvl100 5y agoBring back the old school Mathematica startup chime! https://community.wolfram.com/groups?p_auth=F0xHCTqs&p_p_id=19&p_p_lifecycle=1&p_p_state=exclusive&p_p_mode=view&p_p_col_id=column-1&p_p_col_count=6&_19_struts_action=%2Fmessage_boards%2Fget_message_attachment&_19_messageId=1983699&_19_attachment=Startup.wav https://community.wolfram.com/groups?p_auth=F0xHCTqs&p_p_id=...
- akoster 5y agoLink to the forum thread if the direct link doesn't work: https://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/1983204 https://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/1983204
- peter303 5y agoA bit like Knuth unhappy with existing mathematics typesetting programs. So he spent a decade writing TeX.
- bicx 5y agoI remember using Maple for some calculus labs, but I ultimately ended up using Octave for a vast majority of all my later math needs. And now I’m a software engineer and I never touch non-discrete math.