4 ms·

> 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 wi

by 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.
- jordigh 13y ago
  I've never known where to focus my efforts for the free stuff. Should I work on Mathics, Sympy, Maxima, or Axiom? Or is Sage itself growing its own routines?
  - nswanberg 13y ago
    What are your goals and strengths? I am not familiar with the state of most of those projects, but fixing bugs and completing todo items is welcome anywhere, I imagine, and if your goal is to improve free software then any of those seem a good choice. That's not a very exciting answer, though. I suggested Mathics because you appear to be interested in what Mathematica can do but resent that it closed source. Since it does not appear that it will be open sourced soon (Taliesin discussed this elsewhere and I got a similar answer from Stephen in an AMA http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/tmutz/stephen_wolfram_nks_10th_anniversary/c4nz7pi http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/tmutz/stephen_wolfram_...), and because duplicating even a portion of a system with a 25-year head start would require a massive amount of effort, it seems the best choice would be to work on a program that would best organize the efforts of the other programs. To agree with that statement one probably has to agree that the language is the best one to build a system around.
    - jordigh 13y ago
      I'm not actually interested in Mathematica itself. I just know it can do lots of things that the free CASes can't. I currently work on Octave because there's so much Matlab code out there that needs to be liberated. Is it the same case with Mathematica code? Are people able to easily take their code from Mathematica and run it in Mathics?
      - sn6uv 13y ago
        That's the idea! In practise, we're still getting there and you may have to work around functions not yet implemented in Mathics. I'd really like to see Mathics become the Octave of Mathematica.
  - 13y ago

by jordigh 13y ago

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.

jordigh 13y ago
I've never known where to focus my efforts for the free stuff. Should I work on Mathics, Sympy, Maxima, or Axiom? Or is Sage itself growing its own routines?
- nswanberg 13y ago
  What are your goals and strengths? I am not familiar with the state of most of those projects, but fixing bugs and completing todo items is welcome anywhere, I imagine, and if your goal is to improve free software then any of those seem a good choice. That's not a very exciting answer, though. I suggested Mathics because you appear to be interested in what Mathematica can do but resent that it closed source. Since it does not appear that it will be open sourced soon (Taliesin discussed this elsewhere and I got a similar answer from Stephen in an AMA http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/tmutz/stephen_wolfram_nks_10th_anniversary/c4nz7pi http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/tmutz/stephen_wolfram_...), and because duplicating even a portion of a system with a 25-year head start would require a massive amount of effort, it seems the best choice would be to work on a program that would best organize the efforts of the other programs. To agree with that statement one probably has to agree that the language is the best one to build a system around.
  - jordigh 13y ago
    I'm not actually interested in Mathematica itself. I just know it can do lots of things that the free CASes can't. I currently work on Octave because there's so much Matlab code out there that needs to be liberated. Is it the same case with Mathematica code? Are people able to easily take their code from Mathematica and run it in Mathics?
    - sn6uv 13y ago
      That's the idea! In practise, we're still getting there and you may have to work around functions not yet implemented in Mathics. I'd really like to see Mathics become the Octave of Mathematica.
- 13y ago