5 ms·

I've always avoided Mathematica. I Use pari/GP, maxima, axiom, perl's Bignum. Mathematica, macsyma, Symbolics, I've always felt monetized what should have been

• sliverstorm 13y ago
  Why should it have been open source? Is quality software not worth paying for? If you are thinking something along the lines of the "purity" of mathematics, and how mathematics "want to be free"- mathematics is free, as evidenced by your use of BigNum, or even pencil-and-paper. Mathematica is just one of the many calculators, and people have happily paid money for calculators for many years.
  • mixmastamyk 13y ago
    Fsf proponents are not concerned with price, rather with freedom.
    • walshemj 13y ago
      The hardline evangelists yes the rest not so much and if you don't realize that I have a bridge I would like to sell you.
    • tzs 13y ago
      There are many kinds of freedom. If a proprietary tool lets me get my work done faster than a free tool would, then using the free tool takes away some of one kind of freedom--namely the freedom to spend my time doing things I want to do instead of things I have to do to pay the bills.
    • adolfojp 13y ago
      It really bothers me to see how the FSF has hijacked the term freedom and redefined it to mean compatible with a very specific set of software licenses while selling it as if they were liberating the Scots from the English monarchy.
  • e3pi 13y ago
    With open source, I am `forced' to figure out how to do things on my own without canned functions. I could be wrong, not having looked at Mathematica for twenty years, but I believe my pattern searching among hundreds of millions of long string filtered generated expressions and their respective digit expansions, requires regular expression processing which takes a lot of practice before it becomes easy but likely necessary, as I don't see how this regular expression processing could be eliminated. Perl is deservedly famous for intrinsically integrating its regex engine, so with other's reference material to grow with, eg, all the good bioinformatics books and perl modules -CPAN open source- everything moving ahead directly and often wonderfully, exploring many novel threads derived off whatever I'm primarily currently focused on.
  • doetoe 13y ago
    I don't necessarily think it should be free (gratis), but a serious math package should definitely be open source to give legitimacy to any result it produces, for the same reason that a proof that is kept secret is not a proof at all.
• skierscott 13y ago
  Matlab is big in my field, and I've avoided it. I use Python instead instead. If I want to do symbolic stuff (like Mathematica does), I can use SymPy. I think being open is good for several reasons. You can inspect the code, meaning that those weird bugs that pop up eventually are solvable. Additionally, the licenses are a pain in the ass. Not having them encourages more collaboration.
  • theorique 13y ago
    Additionally, the licenses are a pain in the ass. Not having them encourages more collaboration. Yes! While Mathematica is a great product (or ecosystem), the license overhead is extremely irritating, and a bit scary if you're running business-critical apps on it. (Lost touch with the license server? Oops, your applications won't run.)