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I'm never sure why projects try to claim themselves as a free alternative to Mathematica. For one, they never seem to reach anywhere near the polish and power o

• divbzero 4y ago
  TIL: Mathematica is free on Raspberry Pi. https://www.wolfram.com/raspberry-pi/ https://www.wolfram.com/raspberry-pi/
  • bmitc 4y ago
    Yea, it's a pretty awesome thing, in my opinion. It ran a bit slow on the old Raspberry Pis, but the Raspberry Pi 4 is obviously much more powerful.
  • homarp 4y ago
    and Minecraft is also free on RPi https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/edition/pi https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/edition/pi
    • hkt 4y ago
      And the free version has a neat open source fork that adds features: https://github.com/MCPI-Revival/minecraft-pi-reborn https://github.com/MCPI-Revival/minecraft-pi-reborn
• bowsamic 4y ago
  > Mathematica is basically already free at most major universities. As a physicist I can say this is definitely not true
• b33j0r 4y ago
  You’re not wrong. It’s just the idea of “what if I accidentally turn my dream hobby into a success?” and “how do I even call lawyers?” and “is any of this worth investing in, on balance?”
• evanb 4y ago
  Mathematica has so much closed-source hidden stuff under the hood that there's a question of correctness. I've certainly found bugs / wrong mathematical facts before.
  • bmitc 4y ago
    There's a question of correctness for any system, no matter how closed or open.
    • ykonstant 4y ago
      But the process of answering that question is vastly different.
    • Karliss 4y ago
      Yes, but having results verified with multiple different software increases the chance that correctness problems will noticed sooner.
  • an1sotropy 4y ago
    Can you share an example of it getting math wrong?
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • dagw 4y ago
      Here is an article from 2014 by a (group of) mathematicians who used Mathematica extensively in their research describing the problems they had with Mathematica when trying to calculate the determinant of a Matrix containing large integers (on the order of 10k digits). The bug was reported in Mathematica 7 and was still there in Mathematica 10. https://www.ams.org/notices/201410/rnoti-p1249.pdf https://www.ams.org/notices/201410/rnoti-p1249.pdf Back when I was using Mathematica a lot (2005-2010ish) the Mathematica usenet group kept an archive of all errors in Mathematica people had found, but it seems to have disappeared off the Internet. If you browse the [bugs] tag in mathematica.stackexchange.com you'll find a few as well (although admittedly many of the issues there are user errors rather than Mathematica getting it wrong)
• Quequau 4y ago
  When I went back to uni, a lot of my classes had us using Mathematica. While the software is fine, I found Steven Wolfram's relentless promotion a bit off-putting. Felt a lot like P. T. Barnum somehow and I wasn't really comfortable being a customer of someone who made me feel like P. T. Barnum was selling me something.
  • an1sotropy 4y ago
    Thanks; you have aptly expressed the vibe I got trying to read through New Kind of Science.
• lixtra 4y ago
  > For students/professors, Mathematica is basically already free at most major universities. When I was still in academia I avoided close source because I want my research to be accessible. It does make a difference if you need to go through some strange license portal to activate your university license or if you can just install it in one line. For me that meant that my scripts run in octave as good as in matlab, if this was feasible (and of course many packages exist only for matlab).
• mat_epice 4y ago
  > For students/professors, Mathematica is basically already free at most major universities. Just because someone else is writing the check doesn't mean it's free. Case in point, the pricing for an individual Mathematica license for use at a college or university ranges from $722/yr to $9k[1], with the customary confusion about what is actually included. [1] https://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/pricing/colleges-universities/#individual https://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/pricing/colleges-univers...
  • krsrhe 4y ago
• newaccount74 4y ago
  I just checked how much a license of Mathematica for Home & Hobby costs. It's €447 one time purchase, or a €224/year subscription. The one time purchase does not include updates, so if something breaks with next years macOS update I will probably have to pay for an upgrade again. This license is pretty pricy for something I just buy for fun, but arguably worth it if you use it often. But I am not allowed to use it for any professional purposes at all. If I just wanted to use it to graph the sales numbers of my side projects (probably not the best tool for the job, but why learn another tool if you have one that does the job?), I would need a professional license which is 10x the price. Being able to run it on the Raspberry Pi for free is nice, but I assume it is also limited to "personal use". Mathematica is ridiculously expensive. It's expensive because it's professional software, and there are few alternatives. If you use it daily as part of your job, the price is absolutely worth it, but if you don't, it's just way overpriced. When I left university, I would have loved to keep using Mathematica, but it was just way too expensive to run it on my laptop, for an app that I would just use a few times per year. And logging into a Raspberry Pi just to use an even slower version of an app that isn't known for being particularly responsive in the first place just isn't something that I care about.
  • kgwgk 4y ago
    [insert anything] is ridiculously expensive. If you use it the price is absolutely worth it, but if you don't, it's just way overpriced.
    • aldanor 4y ago
      Disagreed. Example: Numi.app and Soulver3.app = both are essentially just fancy calculators with built-in unit conversions and a few other convenient features. I use them maybe once a month, but €30 for a lifetime license with no subscription is more than ok for what they are.
    • danuker 4y ago
      I would perhaps say: if it offers you more value (not necessarily financial) than its cost, then it's worth it. But this is a truism also.
• throwyo223a65 4y ago
  >And secondly, is Mathematica really that expensive if you use it in your job/industry? If you live in a developing country where the average salary is $50-$300/month and your company's revenue is similarly thin, yes it is really expensive. I tried to discuss pricing with Mathematica on behalf of one of these companies and after a few initial exchanges to assess our needs, the sales representatives did not even bother getting back to us and started ghosting us. The world is not limited to wealthy western countries, countries in Africa, Asia and other regions of the world are increasingly aspiring to develop their technology sector by building an ecosystem of engineering companies. Mathics and similar initiatives are therefore more than welcome. Even in a developed country, there are many reasons not to want to tie yourself to a proprietary tech so central to your operations, especially in today's world. For example, what about if you are a Chinese company and the US treasury decides to blacklist your company or country?
  • 2b3a51 4y ago
    "countries in Africa, Asia and other regions of the world are increasingly aspiring to develop their technology sector by building an ecosystem of engineering companies" So by basing that ecosystem around open source software where appropriate, these companies and their employees can avoid the lock in and restrictions of commercial software. I'd expect them to be overtaking the tired Western industrial world fairly soon - or at least being a lot more nimble.
• ogogmad 4y ago
  > For students/professors, Mathematica is basically already free at most major universities. I think this is usually an on-premise license, and not a license to use it on your own computer offline. You can use it on the cloud. I'm not sure what else you can do with such a license.
• opan 4y ago
  For me, free as in freedom is the primary concern. A proprietary programming language seems a bit ridiculous. I don't see myself paying for a programming language either, though. Libre and gratis are the norm in this space, so going against that sticks out in a bad way. It's like text editors and web browsers. We've had good free options for a long time. Anyone trying to push a non-free option might as well be giving out malware. That malware isn't appealing whether it has a pricetag or not.
  • phforms 4y ago
    There is an interesting article about the reasons why Wolfram decided against open source and why their products would not have been possible otherwise: 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... As much as I don’t like it either, I can understand their perspective and actually believe that it might have been very hard to create and sustain such a comprehensive, thoughtfully and consistently designed language with an open source model. But it may be interesting to see if there are projects of similar scale with similar requirements that thrive (long-term) on a free and open source model.
    • xigoi 4y ago
      Most of the points in the article are for centralized development, which has nothing to do with open source.
  • lake_vincent 4y ago
    This! I am coding something right now that Mathematica would honestly make 100x easier, but I refuse to use it because I want my software to be FOSS, and not depend on a proprietary language. I respect Wolfram's enginuity, but I resent his ego for keeping us all out of his walled garden.
• kome 4y ago
  it's nice you find it cheap, because i find it very very expensive.
• fsh 4y ago
  I agree that Mathematica is extremely powerful, but in my opinion calling it polished is quite a stretch. The notebook interface has a look and feel as if it was hacked together in two weeks in 2004. Kernel startup and function evaluations can be extremely slow (how the hell did Mathematica 1 run on 1988 hardware?). Sometimes, long-running evaluations can be interrupted, sometimes doing it crashes the kernel. The arcane functional programming language makes writing procedures extremely painful (control flow is handled by nesting If[] functions). Plots are borderline unreadable by default. Customizing them is very complicated and inflexible compared to OOP-based plotting libraries in other languages. Many features don't work at all. I once tried exporting an animated plot as a video file, and most codecs were simply broken. Sometimes PDF exports of plots are Megabyte sized for no good reason. Instead of fixing such basic stuff, Wolfram keeps adding cloud features that nobody asked for and machine learning stuff that nobody uses. For the vast majority of users, Mathematica 7 is functionally identical to Mathematica 13. Unfortunately, there still is no real alternative, so everyone keeps giving them lots of money for a frankly very unfinished product.
  • deleted 4y ago
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  • an1sotropy 4y ago
    > Plots are borderline unreadable by default Really? Of all your complaints that one seems the least true, in my experience. I think plots are lovely by default, but then 5% of the time it’s crap and then I’m cursing, with you, at how alien and annoying the whole thing has become. I used Mathematica in 1988 on a Mac and have been grateful that my employment has given me free access ever since. The notebook interface feels basically the same to me as it did in 1988, when it was an incredible innovation. Now, it is a little annoying. I also don’t know what feels unfinished about it, but it sounds like you’ve spent more time wrestling with it than me. It has been an incredibly enduring product that still wins at symbolic math. And I also hope open source tools can replace it in my work.
    • fsh 4y ago
      In my opinion, the axes labels are way too small and in a weird location, the lines are too thin, and the default color cycle has many colors that are indistinguishable for people with red–green color blindness (8% of all men). I have been in many meetings where someone could not read some of the Mathematica plots on the slides.
• bigbacaloa 4y ago
  Mathematica is prohibitively expensive. I work at a public technical university in Europe and we have no licenses for mathematica.
• batmanturkey 4y ago
  One may want an open source tool for such a foundational requirement. One may decide that it’s too unstable or dangerous to base one’s primary tools in proprietary software land. I have precisely this concern in my fields of work.
• medo-bear 4y ago
  > And secondly, is Mathematica really that expensive if you use it in your job/industry? i would pay double/triple the price if it was open source. i shudder at the thought of doing scientific work with help of a magic black box
• forgotpwd16 4y ago
  >I'm never sure why projects try to claim themselves as a free alternative to Mathematica. In this case it's an open-source project reimplementing Mathematica (though technically only the Wolfram language). >For hobbyists, Mathematica is free on a Raspberry Pi, Also Wolfram Engine (which due to previous technicality is closer to Mathics) is free anywhere. >And secondly, is Mathematica really that expensive if you use it in your job/industry? The point isn't the price but but that an important software used in academic research is closed source. Those that value open science want to have a way to reproduce results using free tools.
• analog31 4y ago
  I love Mathematica, though I don't use it today. Free tools have taken over programming, and I doubt that cost is the main reason. I don't know if there are any proprietary programming tools in widespread use any more. The same benefits might apply to software for "the rest of us." Outside of truly enlightened organizations, the cost ends up being just high enough to trigger all sorts of wasteful habits such as: Management approval, dealing with the purchasing department (on a recurring basis these days), using outdated versions, shared licenses, centralized installations, node locking, separate "development" and "run-time" environments, and so forth. For one specialized app that I use at my workplace, it costs a few man-hours per year to renew the subscription. The license server is on a firewalled domain, maintained by IT, so I can't use the software at home unless I carry a computer back and forth every day. On my bike. Use of that software tacitly assumes certain work habits such as doing your work mostly in one place. The cost frustrates sharing. If you want to share something you made, your victim has to buy their own license to use it. In the time that it takes to hash out the purchase of software X, I can have my entire toolchain (Python, Arduino, WxMaxima, etc) on every computer that I touch: In my office, the labs, and at home. This has radically changed how I incorporate (mostly) Python into my life at work and at home.
  • kgwgk 4y ago
    > I don't know if there are any proprietary programming tools in widespread use any more. Isn’t Xcode is a widely used programming tool?
    • analog31 4y ago
      Ah, good call. I admit that my claim is based on having periodically googled "top programming languages" over the years. So a few proprietary tools may have fallen through my sieve.
      • kgwgk 4y ago
        Another obvious example is the CUDA toolkit - unless you don't consider it a programming tool.
• deleted 4y ago
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