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Man, I miss Wolfram Language. Once you've twisted your brain a little to grok its usage, it's such an incredibly high-value tool, especially for exploration and

Man, I miss Wolfram Language. Once you've twisted your brain a little to grok its usage, it's such an incredibly high-value tool, especially for exploration and prototyping. I saw it more as a do-anything software tool for researchers rather than as a language aimed at programmers, so I put on a researcher hat and tried to forget everything I knew as a professional programmer, and had a few memorable seasons with it around 2016-2020. I remember calculating precisely which days of the year would cause the sunlight to pass through a window and some glass blocks in an internal wall, creating a beautiful light show indoors. It only took a couple of minutes to get a nice animated visualisation and a calendar. Nowadays I'd probably just ask Claude to figure it out for me, but pre LLMs, WL was the highest value tool for thought in my toolbox. (Edit: and they actually offer perpetual licenses!)

ktpsns 10mo ago
The power of the language came from the concise syntax (I liked it more then classical LISPs) with the huge library of Mathematica. When Python is "batteries included", Mathematica is "spaceship included". If this was open sourced, it had the potential to severely change the software/IT industry. As an expensive proprietary software however, it is deemed to stay a niche product mainly for academia.
- redfloatplane 10mo ago
  That's exactly the same analogy I used to use, although I said "nuclear reactor included" - spaceship is better, it implies less danger and more expanded horizons!
- themafia 10mo ago
  > As an expensive proprietary software however It's $195/year for a personal license. And only $75/year for students. Their licensing model is pretty broad.
  - zorked 10mo ago
    It still creates a class of haves and have-nots which prevents forming a community. Plus you buy a version of it, and then someone else is on another version, and you don't have the same features, and the tiny community is fragmented.
  - bborud 10mo ago
    Well, that doesn't sound too bad. But this is a high enough barrier for Mathematica to not see wide spread use. I don't remember what the pricing has been throughout the years. But I do remember that for some of the time I couldn't really afford Mathematica. And the license I wanted was also a bit too expensive to justify for a piece of software that only I would be using within an organization. Because it is also about enough other people around you not being able to justify the expense. And about companies not wanting to pay a lot of money for licenses so they can lock their computations into an ecosystem that is very small. Mathematica is, in the computing world, pretty irrelevant. And I'm being generous when I say "pretty": I have never encountered it in any job or even in academia. People know of it. They just don't use it for work. It would have been nice if the language and the runtime had been open source. But Wolfram didn't want to go in that direction. That's a perfectly fine choice to make. But it does mean that as a language, Mathematica will never be important. Nor will knowing how to program in it be a marketable skill. (To Stephen Wolfram it really doesn't matter. He obviously makes a good living. I'm not sure I'd bother with the noise and stress coming from open sourcing something)
    - aleph_minus_one 10mo ago
      > And I'm being generous when I say "pretty": I have never encountered it in any job or even in academia. People know of it. They just don't use it for work. To my knowledge, at least in academia, Wolfram (Mathematica) seems to be used quite a bit by physicists. Also in some areas of mathematics it is used (but many mathematicians seems to prefer Maple). Concerning mathematical research, I want to mention that by now also some open-source (and often more specialized) CASs seem to have become more widespread, such as SageMath, SymPy, Macaulay2, GP/PARI or GAP.
- pjmlp 10mo ago
  As discussed on another thread, the outcome is poorly tools glued together, due to lack of roadmap and polish that commercial software usually supports, instead of volunteers coming and going, only caring for their little ich.
  - wasmainiac 10mo ago
    I’m not sure about that. I used to use LabView and its various libraries often. The whole thing felt scattered and ossified. I’d take a python standard library any day.
    - pjmlp 10mo ago
      Yet most EE engineers rather use a graphical tool like LabView or Simulink. Not everyone is keen doing scripting from command line with vi.
      - sallveburrpi 10mo ago
        Maybe it’s different for those actually working in the profession and n=1 but in my (many) years of studying EE I never used these tools even once.
      - amluto 10mo ago
        I once interned at a lab that used a piece of surely overpriced hardware that integrated with Simulink. You would make a Simulink model, and you’d click something and the computer would (IIRC) compile it to C and upload it to the hardware. On the bright side, you didn’t waste time bikeshedding about how to structure things. On the other hand, actually implementing any sort of nontrivial logic was incredibly unpleasant.
        wasmainiac 10mo ago
        Hahaha yep, so much clicking after One day my finger was actually sore.
      - wasmainiac 10mo ago
- kingkongjaffa 10mo ago
  > If this was open sourced, it had the potential to severely change the software/IT industry. As an engineering undergrad I had a similar feeling about Matlab & Mathematica. Matlab especially had 'tool boxes' that you bought as add-ons to do specific engineering calcs and simulations and it was great, but I almost always found myself recreating things in python just because it felt slightly more sane to handle data and glue code. Pandas and Matplotlib and SciPy all used via an ipython notebook were almost a replacement.
- escanda 10mo ago
  Actually, Wolfram Language is based on Tiny Caml. M-expression based though. Lisps are neat and cosy too.
- YoshiRulz 10mo ago
  There is of course a FOSS rewrite https://mathics.org https://mathics.org
dr_kiszonka 10mo ago
Interesting. I have always felt I am missing out on not using tools like Mathematica or MatLab. I see some people doing everything using MatLab, including building GUI and DL models, which I found surprising for a single software suite, and - nowadays - one that is quite affordable (at least the home edition). Mathematica seems a little pricey but maybe it would motivate me to learn more math. I would love to read what non-mathematicians use MatLab, Mathematica, and Maple for.
- redfloatplane 10mo ago
  I'm a non-mathematician and I used it for lots of novel stuff - GIS, visualisations of all kinds, machine learning. The Wolfram Community staff picks is a great introduction into the varied things you can do: https://community.wolfram.com/content?curTag=staff%20picks https://community.wolfram.com/content?curTag=staff%20picks
- Keyframe 10mo ago
  I used mathematica for real last time in SGI days and loved it. I know probably a ton has changed since, but I do have to ask those that use it today if you'd still use it for non math-heavy (and even so) tasks if you have access to the wonderful world of python and jupyter / polars, R, and similar?
  - gucci-on-fleek 10mo ago
    Mathematica is awesome for weird, one-off tasks in fields that I'm unfamiliar with, since the documentation is excellent, and the functionality is really broad (so I don't need to figure out how to install a specialty program for every one-off task). But for fields that I'm experienced with or tasks that I'm planning on running frequently, I'll usually just use Python, since most of the Python libraries have more functionality and run quicker than Mathematica. (Mathematica is of course much better than Python at symbolic math, but this isn't what you are asking about)
- 3abiton 10mo ago
  To be fair it was used a lot during my physics studies. I opted to use it afterwards for integrals and derivations, very powerful.
jiggawatts 10mo ago
I've had it installed on my laptop for over two decades, and I use it maybe once a year for actual work. Every time, it feels like cracking a walnut with a 500-ton press. Mathematica is way, way under appreciated in industry, and even in the sciences.
jwr 10mo ago
> Nowadays I'd probably just ask Claude to figure it out for me Incidentally, Mathematica + LLMs make a great combination. If you take what is pretty much the biggest mathematical routine library in the world and combine it with interactive visualization tools, and then use an LLM to accelerate things, it becomes an incredible tool. Almost ridiculously powerful for trying things out, teaching, visualizing things, etc. (I've been using Mathematica since 1992 or so, so I'm familiar with the language, but it's still so much faster to just tell Claude to visualize this or that)
- redfloatplane 10mo ago
  Yes, I’m sure! I had mostly stopped using WL by the time ChatGPT came out and so my only experience of their integration is a lot of hallucinated syntax by GPT3. I’ve not been tempted to upgrade to the newer, more LLM-integrated versions yet, particularly because I’ve been trying to cut down on expenses and spending more money on LLM api calls versus just using my existing Anthropic subscription for Claude code isn’t that appealing. I’ve also been going through a bit of a crisis of a lack of creativity and inventiveness and it’s hard to decide to spend money on an update when it doesn’t seem like I have any good ideas of what to do with it after I’ve spent the cash! I bet that if they can integrate LLMs _really_ well (I’m not sure the chat driven notebook thing is necessarily the way) it’ll be a massive upgrade.

ktpsns 10mo ago

The power of the language came from the concise syntax (I liked it more then classical LISPs) with the huge library of Mathematica. When Python is "batteries included", Mathematica is "spaceship included". If this was open sourced, it had the potential to severely change the software/IT industry. As an expensive proprietary software however, it is deemed to stay a niche product mainly for academia.

redfloatplane 10mo ago
That's exactly the same analogy I used to use, although I said "nuclear reactor included" - spaceship is better, it implies less danger and more expanded horizons!
themafia 10mo ago
> As an expensive proprietary software however It's $195/year for a personal license. And only $75/year for students. Their licensing model is pretty broad.
- zorked 10mo ago
  It still creates a class of haves and have-nots which prevents forming a community. Plus you buy a version of it, and then someone else is on another version, and you don't have the same features, and the tiny community is fragmented.
- bborud 10mo ago
  Well, that doesn't sound too bad. But this is a high enough barrier for Mathematica to not see wide spread use. I don't remember what the pricing has been throughout the years. But I do remember that for some of the time I couldn't really afford Mathematica. And the license I wanted was also a bit too expensive to justify for a piece of software that only I would be using within an organization. Because it is also about enough other people around you not being able to justify the expense. And about companies not wanting to pay a lot of money for licenses so they can lock their computations into an ecosystem that is very small. Mathematica is, in the computing world, pretty irrelevant. And I'm being generous when I say "pretty": I have never encountered it in any job or even in academia. People know of it. They just don't use it for work. It would have been nice if the language and the runtime had been open source. But Wolfram didn't want to go in that direction. That's a perfectly fine choice to make. But it does mean that as a language, Mathematica will never be important. Nor will knowing how to program in it be a marketable skill. (To Stephen Wolfram it really doesn't matter. He obviously makes a good living. I'm not sure I'd bother with the noise and stress coming from open sourcing something)
  - aleph_minus_one 10mo ago
    > And I'm being generous when I say "pretty": I have never encountered it in any job or even in academia. People know of it. They just don't use it for work. To my knowledge, at least in academia, Wolfram (Mathematica) seems to be used quite a bit by physicists. Also in some areas of mathematics it is used (but many mathematicians seems to prefer Maple). Concerning mathematical research, I want to mention that by now also some open-source (and often more specialized) CASs seem to have become more widespread, such as SageMath, SymPy, Macaulay2, GP/PARI or GAP.
pjmlp 10mo ago
As discussed on another thread, the outcome is poorly tools glued together, due to lack of roadmap and polish that commercial software usually supports, instead of volunteers coming and going, only caring for their little ich.
- wasmainiac 10mo ago
  I’m not sure about that. I used to use LabView and its various libraries often. The whole thing felt scattered and ossified. I’d take a python standard library any day.
  - pjmlp 10mo ago
    Yet most EE engineers rather use a graphical tool like LabView or Simulink. Not everyone is keen doing scripting from command line with vi.
    - sallveburrpi 10mo ago
      Maybe it’s different for those actually working in the profession and n=1 but in my (many) years of studying EE I never used these tools even once.
    - amluto 10mo ago
      I once interned at a lab that used a piece of surely overpriced hardware that integrated with Simulink. You would make a Simulink model, and you’d click something and the computer would (IIRC) compile it to C and upload it to the hardware. On the bright side, you didn’t waste time bikeshedding about how to structure things. On the other hand, actually implementing any sort of nontrivial logic was incredibly unpleasant.
      - wasmainiac 10mo ago
        Hahaha yep, so much clicking after One day my finger was actually sore.
    - wasmainiac 10mo ago
kingkongjaffa 10mo ago
> If this was open sourced, it had the potential to severely change the software/IT industry. As an engineering undergrad I had a similar feeling about Matlab & Mathematica. Matlab especially had 'tool boxes' that you bought as add-ons to do specific engineering calcs and simulations and it was great, but I almost always found myself recreating things in python just because it felt slightly more sane to handle data and glue code. Pandas and Matplotlib and SciPy all used via an ipython notebook were almost a replacement.
escanda 10mo ago
Actually, Wolfram Language is based on Tiny Caml. M-expression based though. Lisps are neat and cosy too.
YoshiRulz 10mo ago
There is of course a FOSS rewrite https://mathics.org https://mathics.org

dr_kiszonka 10mo ago

Interesting. I have always felt I am missing out on not using tools like Mathematica or MatLab. I see some people doing everything using MatLab, including building GUI and DL models, which I found surprising for a single software suite, and - nowadays - one that is quite affordable (at least the home edition). Mathematica seems a little pricey but maybe it would motivate me to learn more math. I would love to read what non-mathematicians use MatLab, Mathematica, and Maple for.

redfloatplane 10mo ago
I'm a non-mathematician and I used it for lots of novel stuff - GIS, visualisations of all kinds, machine learning. The Wolfram Community staff picks is a great introduction into the varied things you can do: https://community.wolfram.com/content?curTag=staff%20picks https://community.wolfram.com/content?curTag=staff%20picks
Keyframe 10mo ago
I used mathematica for real last time in SGI days and loved it. I know probably a ton has changed since, but I do have to ask those that use it today if you'd still use it for non math-heavy (and even so) tasks if you have access to the wonderful world of python and jupyter / polars, R, and similar?
- gucci-on-fleek 10mo ago
  Mathematica is awesome for weird, one-off tasks in fields that I'm unfamiliar with, since the documentation is excellent, and the functionality is really broad (so I don't need to figure out how to install a specialty program for every one-off task). But for fields that I'm experienced with or tasks that I'm planning on running frequently, I'll usually just use Python, since most of the Python libraries have more functionality and run quicker than Mathematica. (Mathematica is of course much better than Python at symbolic math, but this isn't what you are asking about)
3abiton 10mo ago
To be fair it was used a lot during my physics studies. I opted to use it afterwards for integrals and derivations, very powerful.

jiggawatts 10mo ago

I've had it installed on my laptop for over two decades, and I use it maybe once a year for actual work. Every time, it feels like cracking a walnut with a 500-ton press. Mathematica is way, way under appreciated in industry, and even in the sciences.

jwr 10mo ago

> Nowadays I'd probably just ask Claude to figure it out for me Incidentally, Mathematica + LLMs make a great combination. If you take what is pretty much the biggest mathematical routine library in the world and combine it with interactive visualization tools, and then use an LLM to accelerate things, it becomes an incredible tool. Almost ridiculously powerful for trying things out, teaching, visualizing things, etc. (I've been using Mathematica since 1992 or so, so I'm familiar with the language, but it's still so much faster to just tell Claude to visualize this or that)

redfloatplane 10mo ago
Yes, I’m sure! I had mostly stopped using WL by the time ChatGPT came out and so my only experience of their integration is a lot of hallucinated syntax by GPT3. I’ve not been tempted to upgrade to the newer, more LLM-integrated versions yet, particularly because I’ve been trying to cut down on expenses and spending more money on LLM api calls versus just using my existing Anthropic subscription for Claude code isn’t that appealing. I’ve also been going through a bit of a crisis of a lack of creativity and inventiveness and it’s hard to decide to spend money on an update when it doesn’t seem like I have any good ideas of what to do with it after I’ve spent the cash! I bet that if they can integrate LLMs _really_ well (I’m not sure the chat driven notebook thing is necessarily the way) it’ll be a massive upgrade.