4 ms·

It's got myriad other issues, but Mathematica is a lot like this. You can have "rich" literals like a sound file or and image or a 3d model and see and manipula

by Y_Y 3y ago

It's got myriad other issues, but Mathematica is a lot like this. You can have "rich" literals like a sound file or and image or a 3d model and see and manipulate along with the source, which has a couple of different levels of syntactic sugar, from being an ugly text-only lisp up to stuff that looks like it comes from a well-illustrated text book. What's missing from my life is a good FOSS equivalent. There are several wonderful tools which do similar things, e.g. Jupyter, org-babel, TeXmacs, Sage, mathics. None of them feel quite right though.

mark_l_watson 3y ago
I once had fantasies about starting an open source project for Common Lisp that would attempt to implement a little bit of the Wolfram data display stuff. I stopped paying for LispWorks, so I no longer have CAPI for GUIs, so that is not going to happen. Racket’s UI support would make Racket a good platform for an open source project like this. (I won’t work on it, LLMs are so much more fascinating than any other tech, and use up my free time). I did recently pay for an entire year of Wolfram Desktop in the hope of really getting into it. I have code experiments for all the stuff I love (machine learning, deep learning, LLM, semantic web, etc.) but to be honest using the Wolfram Language does not give me the joy that I get using Common Lisp,and various Schemes, and, for some things Python is the most practical language.
bitwize 3y ago
HolyC is like this as well.
xdavidliu 3y ago
i bought a year sub to the “deluxe” pack of mathematica for like 300usd. it was pretty good, but one glaring weakness is lack of lazy streams. This came to my attention when i attempted problem 7ish in project euler, which asked something like “sum all the fibonacci numbers less than a million” or something. Woulda been perfectly elegantly done in Haskell using a stream and only TAKEing what I needed, but in mathematica I need an imperatice monstrosity using Do, For, While, etc. I was absolutely disgusted and didnt bother renewing.

by Y_Y 3y ago

mark_l_watson 3y ago

I once had fantasies about starting an open source project for Common Lisp that would attempt to implement a little bit of the Wolfram data display stuff. I stopped paying for LispWorks, so I no longer have CAPI for GUIs, so that is not going to happen. Racket’s UI support would make Racket a good platform for an open source project like this. (I won’t work on it, LLMs are so much more fascinating than any other tech, and use up my free time). I did recently pay for an entire year of Wolfram Desktop in the hope of really getting into it. I have code experiments for all the stuff I love (machine learning, deep learning, LLM, semantic web, etc.) but to be honest using the Wolfram Language does not give me the joy that I get using Common Lisp,and various Schemes, and, for some things Python is the most practical language.

bitwize 3y ago

HolyC is like this as well.

xdavidliu 3y ago

i bought a year sub to the “deluxe” pack of mathematica for like 300usd. it was pretty good, but one glaring weakness is lack of lazy streams. This came to my attention when i attempted problem 7ish in project euler, which asked something like “sum all the fibonacci numbers less than a million” or something. Woulda been perfectly elegantly done in Haskell using a stream and only TAKEing what I needed, but in mathematica I need an imperatice monstrosity using Do, For, While, etc. I was absolutely disgusted and didnt bother renewing.