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Mathics - A free, light-weight alternative to Mathematica with support for Sage
- christiangenco 14y agoOh man this is fantastic. Where was this when I was taking linear algebra?
- veridies 14y agoIt would be great if it would allow R functions; it's a much better engine for stats than Sage.
- ohgodthecat 14y agoIf you can use python libraries there are a few libraries which allow you to use R functions through python, so that may be an option. Edit: Here they are: http://rpy.sourceforge.net/rpy2.html http://rpy.sourceforge.net/rpy2.html http://rpy.sourceforge.net/rpy.html http://rpy.sourceforge.net/rpy.html
- veyron 14y agoSage covers many things, including symbolic algebra. TMK R does not handle those well ...
- altrego99 14y agoFor numeric computations on statistical data I would recommend to keep using R. R does not do symbolic algebra, which is what makes Mathematica so impressive.
- oofabz 14y agoI love a lot of things about Mathematica. Its syntax is not one of them.
- freditup 14y agoI think Mathematica is designed more for engineering/non programming folks. You would think this shouldn't affect people with programming backgrounds, but I also have felt Mathematica seems much harder to learn than some other languages.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- veyron 14y agoSum[x^2,{x,1,y}]-y*(y+1)*(2*y+1)/6 mathematica correctly handles this: $ math Mathematica 8.0 for Mac OS X x86 (64-bit) Copyright 1988-2010 Wolfram Research, Inc. In[1]:= Sum[x^2,{x,1,y}]-y*(y+1)*(2*y+1)/6 Out[1]= 0 but mathics bombs out with error Sum::iterb: Iterator does not have appropriate bounds. Sum::iterb: Iterator does not have appropriate bounds.
- Rickasaurus 14y agoI'm sure it will get better with time. It's trying to catch up with a huge software product that has hundreds if not thousands of professional engineers working full time on it. You should file a bug report.
- kanzure 14y agoCould you provide a citation that Mathematica has "if not thousands of professional engineers working full time on it", please? I also find the claims of 100s dubious. But I'm interested.
- rmah 14y agoWikipedia.org states that Wolfram Research has 400+ employees. Given typical software company staffing levels, they probably have apx 100 people working on product development. For comparison, similar software companies include MathWorks, the publishers of Matlab, with 2,400 employees and SAS Institute with 12,000 employees.
- mvzink 14y agoThat low number just makes Mathematica all the more impressive, especially considering that I wasn't nearly as impressed with my brief experience with Matlab. On the other hand, I use neither regularly, and SAS and MathWorks probably do other stuff too :P
- katabatic 14y agoIn addition to that, Mathematica has been in continuous development for over 24 years. So give Mathics a little time to catch up :)
- chj 14y agoThe latency kills the fun. But it is free, what can you say!
- sn6uv 14y agoI am an undergraduate physics student, and we are forced to use Mathematica on a weekly basis. I avoid it whenever possible, but this is what I've been looking for. Awesome!
- ohgodthecat 14y agoWhy do you avoid it, because it is proprietary? Because mathematica is actually really a pretty great math program.
- sn6uv 14y agoYeah, mostly because it is proprietary and crashes often (Mathematica 8 especially). The vast majority of students in my program are non-programmers. The only 'programming language' they know is mathematica which I think is a real shame. Worse than that is that most of them have developed a dependence on Mathematica; without it they are severely limited in what they can do. We are provided with free copies (student version), but once we graduate will have to pay the full price if we want to continue using it. I guess I just don't like having my abilities to solve problems tied to an expensive, closed source program. I do admit, it is very powerful.
- onedognight 14y ago> The only 'programming language' they know is mathematica which I think is a real shame. Mathematica is a real functional programming language. It's a lisp with CamelCase builtins and consistent naming. And that's without any of its math goodness. It has superb documentation and a huge standard library. If you master it, you can master any lisp with a simple translator. matlab is a toy by comparison.
- gituliar 14y agoA key concepts beyond Mathematica are pattern matching and rule-based programming, but not a functional programming. Yes, it has lambdas and first-class functions, but that's it. What about closures, for example? Therefore one would better not call Mathematica "a real functional programming language". BTW, rule-based paradigm and pattern matching is a standard feature of languages from Lisp family, e.g. Scheme. From that point of view Mathematica is not something unique.
- programnature 14y agoInteresting attempt, but it is easy to break. Try Plot[Sin[x], {x, -5, 200}] The plot is all over the place. In Mathematica it is a smooth sine wave. You can put the same input into Wolfram Alpha and see how it looks there.
- gsivil 14y agoSad that once more the most upvoted comment is negative. Congratulations for attacking a problem like this one.
- pbhjpbhj 14y agoHow do you know how many upvotes a comment has?
- drcube 14y agoAren't HN comments sorted in order of popularity by votes? Is the top comment not the highest upvoted? I don't know, but this is what I've always assumed.
- nitrogen 14y agoLast I heard (and I'm no authority on the subject), HN uses a sorting algorithm that incorporates many variables, including the age of the post, number of upvotes, reputation of the commenter, etc.
- joelthelion 14y agoThis looks neat, but isn't it contributing to the fragmentation of the python numerical ecosystem? We already have Numpy/Scipy/SAGE/SymPy and probably more, do we really need yet another package?
- opminion 14y agoIt's built on top of Sage, which is built on top of SciPy. There is a need for a Mathematica-like syntax parser. (Edited)
- thvdburgt 14y agoI can't seem to find the license for the source code anywhere, that is a bit of a bummer.
- mkl 14y agoIt's GPL (click on the source code link and scroll down).
- iambot 14y agoThe use online link is 404 ing, not sure if it's just for me, a pitty I would have liked to have seen that page.
- pbhjpbhj 14y ago>The programming language of Mathics is meant to resemble Wolfram's famous Mathematica® as much as possible. // Sounds,like the sort of thing an opposition lawyer would bring up in IP proceedings in a "so you copied the implementation and interface" sort of way ...
- pbhjpbhj 14y ago>The programming language of Mathics is meant to resemble Wolfram's famous Mathematica® as much as possible. // Sounds,like the sort of thing an opposition lawyer would bring up in IP proceedings in a "so you copied the implementation and interface" sort of way ...
- pnathan 14y agoWhat about Maxima[1]? I've used it for the last 7 years when I needed mathematical operations. Its not only gratis, its libre. [1] http://maxima.sourceforge.net/ http://maxima.sourceforge.net/