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> I don't get it... Wolfram is a money-hungry egomaniac. That's kinda funny. Our revenue per employee is lower than the industry average. If the company was in

> I don't get it... Wolfram is a money-hungry egomaniac. That's kinda funny. Our revenue per employee is lower than the industry average. If the company was interested in money uber alles, there are many more profitable and less interesting ways of doing it than what we do now. > not a single source line of Mathematica code is exposed Well, not sure what you mean by 'exposed'. But you can read large swathes of our code by looking in the right place in the installation. We also have some official open source projects, like our HadoopLink: https://github.com/shadanan/HadoopLink https://github.com/shadanan/HadoopLink

ethomson 13y ago
Obviously he was talking about Stephen, the person, not Wolfram Research, the company.
- sesqu 13y ago
  I assumed he was talking about Conrad, the person making this announcement.
lutusp 13y ago
>> I don't get it... Wolfram is a money-hungry egomaniac. > That's kinda funny. Our revenue per employee is lower than the industry average. That's true for investment banks too (i.e. lower than comparable management positions in other fields), but this doesn't mean the higher-ups aren't money-hungry egomaniacs. In fact, it can be argued that when the salaries of mid-level employees are low compared to industry norms, that fact may be used to argue that the company is top-heavy, even possibly money-hungry. > But you can read large swathes of our code by looking in the right place in the installation. This is misleading. One can read all sorts of user-level script code, but no source code at all. It's not an accident, and it explains why Mathematica cannot be used in serious mathematical work, work meant for technical and scientific publication and peer review.
- taliesinb 13y ago
  > In fact, it can be argued that when the salaries of mid-level employees are low compared to industry norms Read my post again: revenue / employee, not salary / revenue. > One can read all sorts of user-level script code, but no source code at all. What? Probably half of the Wolfram Language is written in the Wolfram Language. How is top-level code not source code? > it explains why Mathematica cannot be used in serious mathematical work, work meant for technical and scientific publication and peer review. You keep saying that... I think the truth is more subtle. A tool like Mathematica might play a crucial role in some result, but the proof or result itself doesn't a priori need to rest on any black box software at all to be reproducible. A nice family of examples would be the class of NP problems, for which the discovery might have been difficult, and achieved via proprietary tools, but the verification is possible via open-source tools or with direct human insight. And that's not even considering physics, biochemistry, engineering, and astronomy, where many of the tools you use will always be expensive and built by industry, and have no impact on peer review. Especially if they are a means to visualizing data to generate hypotheses, or processing or wrangling data into a tractable form.
  - ethomson 13y ago
    Is Wolfram suddenly making public statements about its earnings?
  - lutusp 13y ago
    > What? Probably half of the Wolfram Language is written in the Wolfram Language. How is top-level code not source code? I can write BASIC code all day long without having access to the engine, the interpreter. But if I publish my result, there will be problems. Also, if the language under discussion were so open, people would write third-party imitations -- not imitations of the results, but of the methods as well. But they can't. They can't because the source is secret. > And that's not even considering physics, biochemistry, engineering, and astronomy, ... The only way a result from a proprietary source would not be an issue is if the result isn't original. A routine statistical result, one that anyone can duplicate, isn't likely to be an issue. But an original result, one in which the mathematics itself is key to the result, would require full disclosure. > ... where many of the tools you use will always be expensive and built by industry, and have no impact on peer review. Not really. Any significant result must be completely transparent. To understand the reasons, review the history of the Mars Climate Orbiter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter Even though the specifications were perfectly clear, even though everything was out in the open, two teams used different unit systems, and a critical mid-flight burn went wrong. Imagine how much worse such things would be if any part of important technical processing was concealed from close inspection.
jordigh 13y ago
> Well, not sure what you mean by 'exposed'. Personally, I would love to see Mathematica's simplification and integration routines some day and discuss them with everyone. That's one of the "basic" things that the free CASes still get so woefully wrong, and for me is one of the most interesting secrets. So you guys (?) released publicly some boring code about linking Mathematica with Hadoop. Big whoop, it's just a wrapper. Where's the real interesting stuff?
- taliesinb 13y ago
  Well, because for the moment the Wolfram Language has such a small fraction of developer mind-share. Which means that open-sourcing our projects during their actual development isn't worth the significant development cost (an entire toolchain would need to be open-sourced, and documented). And it also is somewhat antithetical to our design process, which is kinda centralized around Stephen himself, who for the most part really does have a good sense of design. I think that could change, though, and then I think there is a really good opportunity to open source more of our stuff and start building stuff collaboratively with a wider community. Especially when our Cloud stuff comes online. Also, I regularly bug Wolfram about open-sourcing some core part of the kernel. He's not in principal against it, but points out that it would cost a lot, buy us nothing in the short term, and fork the language. But I think it'll happen eventually, hopefully sooner rather than later.
  - akater 13y ago
    Ah, a relief. Not that I doubted that S.W. is a reasonable person but open source vs closed source is such a… “religious” topic. :-) Collaborations in Wolfram language will be a pretty unique experiment, for they are likely to unite people from very different fields (including, of course, lots of non-programmers). It's going to be great.
- nswanberg 13y ago
  It's a poor substitute, but consider contributing to Mathics, an open-source Mathematica implementation written in Python. I believe it is integrated with Sage. https://github.com/poeschko/Mathics https://github.com/poeschko/Mathics (I imagine it would also run on the Raspberry Pi). There is likely a lot left to be done in the core language, but encourage folks to start with v1 of the language: http://reference.wolfram.com/legacy/v1/ http://reference.wolfram.com/legacy/v1/ Once the core of the language is working, implementing things like simplification and integration become much easier: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Areference.wolfram.com%2Flegacy%2Fv1%2Fcontents%2FA.3.2.pdf&oq=cache%3Areference.wolfram.com%2Flegacy%2Fv1%2Fcontents%2FA.3.2.pdf http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Arefer... It seems unlikely that such a movement would grow to be the size of Mathematica or the Wolfram language, but then again Linux and Wikipedia also seemed unlikely at the time.

ethomson 13y ago

Obviously he was talking about Stephen, the person, not Wolfram Research, the company.

sesqu 13y ago
I assumed he was talking about Conrad, the person making this announcement.

lutusp 13y ago

>> I don't get it... Wolfram is a money-hungry egomaniac. > That's kinda funny. Our revenue per employee is lower than the industry average. That's true for investment banks too (i.e. lower than comparable management positions in other fields), but this doesn't mean the higher-ups aren't money-hungry egomaniacs. In fact, it can be argued that when the salaries of mid-level employees are low compared to industry norms, that fact may be used to argue that the company is top-heavy, even possibly money-hungry. > But you can read large swathes of our code by looking in the right place in the installation. This is misleading. One can read all sorts of user-level script code, but no source code at all. It's not an accident, and it explains why Mathematica cannot be used in serious mathematical work, work meant for technical and scientific publication and peer review.

taliesinb 13y ago
> In fact, it can be argued that when the salaries of mid-level employees are low compared to industry norms Read my post again: revenue / employee, not salary / revenue. > One can read all sorts of user-level script code, but no source code at all. What? Probably half of the Wolfram Language is written in the Wolfram Language. How is top-level code not source code? > it explains why Mathematica cannot be used in serious mathematical work, work meant for technical and scientific publication and peer review. You keep saying that... I think the truth is more subtle. A tool like Mathematica might play a crucial role in some result, but the proof or result itself doesn't a priori need to rest on any black box software at all to be reproducible. A nice family of examples would be the class of NP problems, for which the discovery might have been difficult, and achieved via proprietary tools, but the verification is possible via open-source tools or with direct human insight. And that's not even considering physics, biochemistry, engineering, and astronomy, where many of the tools you use will always be expensive and built by industry, and have no impact on peer review. Especially if they are a means to visualizing data to generate hypotheses, or processing or wrangling data into a tractable form.
- ethomson 13y ago
  Is Wolfram suddenly making public statements about its earnings?
- lutusp 13y ago
  > What? Probably half of the Wolfram Language is written in the Wolfram Language. How is top-level code not source code? I can write BASIC code all day long without having access to the engine, the interpreter. But if I publish my result, there will be problems. Also, if the language under discussion were so open, people would write third-party imitations -- not imitations of the results, but of the methods as well. But they can't. They can't because the source is secret. > And that's not even considering physics, biochemistry, engineering, and astronomy, ... The only way a result from a proprietary source would not be an issue is if the result isn't original. A routine statistical result, one that anyone can duplicate, isn't likely to be an issue. But an original result, one in which the mathematics itself is key to the result, would require full disclosure. > ... where many of the tools you use will always be expensive and built by industry, and have no impact on peer review. Not really. Any significant result must be completely transparent. To understand the reasons, review the history of the Mars Climate Orbiter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter Even though the specifications were perfectly clear, even though everything was out in the open, two teams used different unit systems, and a critical mid-flight burn went wrong. Imagine how much worse such things would be if any part of important technical processing was concealed from close inspection.

jordigh 13y ago

> Well, not sure what you mean by 'exposed'. Personally, I would love to see Mathematica's simplification and integration routines some day and discuss them with everyone. That's one of the "basic" things that the free CASes still get so woefully wrong, and for me is one of the most interesting secrets. So you guys (?) released publicly some boring code about linking Mathematica with Hadoop. Big whoop, it's just a wrapper. Where's the real interesting stuff?

taliesinb 13y ago
Well, because for the moment the Wolfram Language has such a small fraction of developer mind-share. Which means that open-sourcing our projects during their actual development isn't worth the significant development cost (an entire toolchain would need to be open-sourced, and documented). And it also is somewhat antithetical to our design process, which is kinda centralized around Stephen himself, who for the most part really does have a good sense of design. I think that could change, though, and then I think there is a really good opportunity to open source more of our stuff and start building stuff collaboratively with a wider community. Especially when our Cloud stuff comes online. Also, I regularly bug Wolfram about open-sourcing some core part of the kernel. He's not in principal against it, but points out that it would cost a lot, buy us nothing in the short term, and fork the language. But I think it'll happen eventually, hopefully sooner rather than later.
- akater 13y ago
  Ah, a relief. Not that I doubted that S.W. is a reasonable person but open source vs closed source is such a… “religious” topic. :-) Collaborations in Wolfram language will be a pretty unique experiment, for they are likely to unite people from very different fields (including, of course, lots of non-programmers). It's going to be great.
nswanberg 13y ago
It's a poor substitute, but consider contributing to Mathics, an open-source Mathematica implementation written in Python. I believe it is integrated with Sage. https://github.com/poeschko/Mathics https://github.com/poeschko/Mathics (I imagine it would also run on the Raspberry Pi). There is likely a lot left to be done in the core language, but encourage folks to start with v1 of the language: http://reference.wolfram.com/legacy/v1/ http://reference.wolfram.com/legacy/v1/ Once the core of the language is working, implementing things like simplification and integration become much easier: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Areference.wolfram.com%2Flegacy%2Fv1%2Fcontents%2FA.3.2.pdf&oq=cache%3Areference.wolfram.com%2Flegacy%2Fv1%2Fcontents%2FA.3.2.pdf http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Arefer... It seems unlikely that such a movement would grow to be the size of Mathematica or the Wolfram language, but then again Linux and Wikipedia also seemed unlikely at the time.