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This is a simplistic comparison that lacks a lot context, failing to distinguish between the power of a language on its own versus the power of a language ecosy

by cs702 14y ago

This is a simplistic comparison that lacks a lot context, failing to distinguish between the power of a language on its own versus the power of a language ecosystem -- including all its libraries and utilities, depth & breadth of community, hosting companies, supporting vendors, etc. Consider that a few years ago, Reddit switched from Lisp to Python, not because they thought the latter was in any way a better language, but (in their own words) because of Common Lisp's "lack of widely used and tested libraries."[1] How does Mathematica's ecosystem compare to those of the popular languages in this comparison? -- [1] http://blog.reddit.com/2005/12/on-lisp.html http://blog.reddit.com/2005/12/on-lisp.html

taliesinb 14y ago
Judge for yourself: http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/Mathematica.html http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/Mathematica.h... The Mathematica 'ecosystem' doesn't benefit much from OSS, but it does benefit from hundreds of smart engineers with diverse backgrounds who work on it full-time. And SW as benevolent dictator, vetting every design decision for consistency and elegance. Don't write a web server in Mathematica -- it's not particularly well suited to that. But if you're writing natural language parsing, knowledge base infrastructure, and algorithmic content for something like Wolfram|Alpha, I can't imagine anything better to use.
- raverbashing 14y ago
  That's the issue Mathematica is too different from the rest. Or mathematically speaking, the intersection between the capabilities of Mathematica and Python for example is smaller than Python and C# You can't have Mathematica serving a web site (for any non trivial amount of users) (WA has a lot of infrastructure to make it happen) On the other hand try to calculate an integral over the gamma function in the complex domain, that's one line in Mathematica and how many I don't know in Python even using some libraries.

by cs702 14y ago

taliesinb 14y ago

Judge for yourself: http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/Mathematica.html http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/Mathematica.h... The Mathematica 'ecosystem' doesn't benefit much from OSS, but it does benefit from hundreds of smart engineers with diverse backgrounds who work on it full-time. And SW as benevolent dictator, vetting every design decision for consistency and elegance. Don't write a web server in Mathematica -- it's not particularly well suited to that. But if you're writing natural language parsing, knowledge base infrastructure, and algorithmic content for something like Wolfram|Alpha, I can't imagine anything better to use.

raverbashing 14y ago
That's the issue Mathematica is too different from the rest. Or mathematically speaking, the intersection between the capabilities of Mathematica and Python for example is smaller than Python and C# You can't have Mathematica serving a web site (for any non trivial amount of users) (WA has a lot of infrastructure to make it happen) On the other hand try to calculate an integral over the gamma function in the complex domain, that's one line in Mathematica and how many I don't know in Python even using some libraries.