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Arithmetic is Hard--To Get Right: Wolfram Research on Excel bug
- kcl 19y agoHe's convinced me. I'm going to use Mathematica for all my spreadsheets now.
- jsjenkins168 19y agoThats kind of like buying a Bugatti Veyron to go pick up groceries. But if you can afford it, more power to you. Mathematica is like $2k IIRC.
- rms 19y agoIt's also available for free on your favorite bittorrent tracker or eMule. I'd use a Bugatti Veyron to get my groceries if I could acquire one for free without causing any economic loss to anyone. Hell, I'd use a new one every single day.
- palish 19y agoBut would you pay for it if you had the money?
- rms 19y agoFor Mathematica, I would buy it if it was required in a specific professional context. For what I normally calculate, Google is fine and I use a TI-89 if I need to solve anything symbolic. Mathematica is significantly harder to use than either of those for me. And instead of a Bugatti Veyron, I'd get two Tesla Roadsters and buy ten more for friends or as company cars for employees.
- tokipin 19y agoi bought mine when i was a student, and it cost me a hundred or two bucks. if i had the money -- yes, i would pay for the non-student version. i don't know of a more multiparadigmy language, and it's more or less the most powerful computational environment available in terms of what you can do unfortunately the language isn't very readable -- not in the semantic sense, but just how it looks. the usage of square brackets for functions (myFun[arg]) is particularly ugly, and absolutely hideous when nested
- kcl 19y agoI was poking fun : )
- deleted 19y ago[deleted]
- joe 19y ago> Of course, this works just fine in Mathematica... Works just fine in bc(1) too.
- axod 19y agoYeah arithmetic is so hard most calculators have bugs in them... oh wait a second...
- derek 19y agoArticle summary: Math is hard, buy Mathematica, buy Mathematica, here's a picture of Excel, buy Mathematica, buy Mathematica, math is hard unless you buy Mathematica, buy Mathematica, BUY MATHEMATICA, BUY MATHEMATICA, ... I SAID BUY MATHEMATICA OR MATH WILL BE HARD!!! BUY IT!!! BUY IT NOW!!! Note that the salesmanship in the summary is a bit more subtle than the actual article.
- mhartl 19y agoThis reminds me of a bug in Mathematica from back in the late '90: there was a whole class of sums that Mathematica said were negative, even though each term in the sum was strictly positive! "Carry problem", my ass.