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I agree. Stephen Wolfram seems to get a lot of hate on HN, but for doing experimental math, puzzle solving, quick data viz, and much more, Wolfram is a deep an
by jonahx 2y ago
I agree.
Stephen Wolfram seems to get a lot of hate on HN, but for doing experimental math, puzzle solving, quick data viz, and much more, Wolfram is a deep and lovely language. The integrated notebook, mouse hover docs, and (shockingly) single massive namespace with thousands of functions somehow add up to a simple and productive experience unlike any other I've used. And I am not generally a fan of "thick" IDEs.
- musicale 2y agoAdding the notebook GUI to a CAS (with a flexible programming language like Lisp or the Mathematica language) was a huge innovation, and we can probably thank Mathematica (along with MathCAD and Maple) for providing the inspiration for other notebook systems such as Jupyter.
- anthk 2y agoA notebook GUI for a CAS it's just a fancy REPL any Lisp had since the 70-80 ;) Think Macsyma.
- musicale 2y agoThe GUI is a big part of what made Mathematica better (for many users) than Macsyma. But it wasn't just the GUI - it was also the document-oriented design where you could save the graphs and computational results, as well as the code to generate them, in a single document. Python had a perfectly functional REPL, but Jupyter notebooks were still a huge advancement.