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Nice article. I totally agree about SymPy making math fun. I used Mathematica a lot in college, but stopped once it wasn’t free to me anymore. Here’s a blog po

by swied 4y ago

Nice article. I totally agree about SymPy making math fun. I used Mathematica a lot in college, but stopped once it wasn’t free to me anymore. Here’s a blog post I made recently showing some fun SymPy calculations. https://www.swied.com/posts/make-a-ringtone-sound/make-a-ringtone-sound.html https://www.swied.com/posts/make-a-ringtone-sound/make-a-rin...

taeric 4y ago
I do wonder how many have just never been exposed to Mathematica and Matlab. I don't think they were perfect, by any measure; but a lot of the things people find amazing about modern open source tooling were near table stakes for advanced tooling decades ago.
- musicale 4y ago
  Not entirely sure why you are downvoted; it seems to have taken decades to get to where we are with Jupyter/sympy/numpy/scipy and similar setups. I left matlab behind years ago, but I still use mathematica occasionally. Though I haven't made a serious effort to try out Maxima, Reduce, or Sagemath.
- analog31 4y ago
  No disagreement. I'm sure many of those modern Python based tools started out with someone looking over at the commercial packages and saying, "why can't we have those things too?" Or, they were dabbling with expanding the functionality of Python as a toy project, and it snowballed. I think the free-ness of Python is a really big deal, because free means you use it for everything, and you use it for things that you expect to share. I don't know the present license terms of those programs, but it used to be that unless you worked for a really enlightened organization, if you had a seat of Mathematica, it meant you had exactly one seat, probably on the computer in your office, possibly the only seat in your department. If you also had computers in the lab, at home, etc., those computers were running something else, such as Python. If Python ever got good enough at something previously reserved for commercial software, even without being comprehensive at that thing, it triggered a decision on whether it was worth the headache of maintaining the commercial license and being chained down to a single computer. I don't do large math projects, and have been satisfied with Maxima. Where I'm beginning to use SymPy is to contain the derivations for formulas within the same Python code that uses those formulas. Mainly it's a readability and documentation play.
RobotToaster 4y ago
I think mathematica is still free for raspberry pi.
syockit 4y ago
Wolfram Engine + VS Code (notebook plugin), anyone?
- cglong 4y ago
  Yes, this discussion sent me down a rabbit hole learning about the free (for non production use) Wolfram Engine, WolframScript, and Wolfram Language kernel for Jupyter!

by swied 4y ago

taeric 4y ago

I do wonder how many have just never been exposed to Mathematica and Matlab. I don't think they were perfect, by any measure; but a lot of the things people find amazing about modern open source tooling were near table stakes for advanced tooling decades ago.

musicale 4y ago
Not entirely sure why you are downvoted; it seems to have taken decades to get to where we are with Jupyter/sympy/numpy/scipy and similar setups. I left matlab behind years ago, but I still use mathematica occasionally. Though I haven't made a serious effort to try out Maxima, Reduce, or Sagemath.
analog31 4y ago
No disagreement. I'm sure many of those modern Python based tools started out with someone looking over at the commercial packages and saying, "why can't we have those things too?" Or, they were dabbling with expanding the functionality of Python as a toy project, and it snowballed. I think the free-ness of Python is a really big deal, because free means you use it for everything, and you use it for things that you expect to share. I don't know the present license terms of those programs, but it used to be that unless you worked for a really enlightened organization, if you had a seat of Mathematica, it meant you had exactly one seat, probably on the computer in your office, possibly the only seat in your department. If you also had computers in the lab, at home, etc., those computers were running something else, such as Python. If Python ever got good enough at something previously reserved for commercial software, even without being comprehensive at that thing, it triggered a decision on whether it was worth the headache of maintaining the commercial license and being chained down to a single computer. I don't do large math projects, and have been satisfied with Maxima. Where I'm beginning to use SymPy is to contain the derivations for formulas within the same Python code that uses those formulas. Mainly it's a readability and documentation play.

RobotToaster 4y ago

I think mathematica is still free for raspberry pi.

syockit 4y ago

Wolfram Engine + VS Code (notebook plugin), anyone?

cglong 4y ago
Yes, this discussion sent me down a rabbit hole learning about the free (for non production use) Wolfram Engine, WolframScript, and Wolfram Language kernel for Jupyter!