3 ms·
It's an amazing language - basically lisp with the biggest standard library you've ever imagined, and nice (but slow) pattern matching. I used to use it all the
by sbrother 13y ago
It's an amazing language - basically lisp with the biggest standard library you've ever imagined, and nice (but slow) pattern matching. I used to use it all the time when I was doing one-off projects at school and for clients. But I don't see it taking off unless it goes FOSS - while I have a license and I'd love to keep using it I can't justify it to employers or clients who want to actually be able to run my code after I leave. The alternatives (Python, R, maybe Julia) are good enough now to do most things you'd want to use Mathematica for, and they don't come with per core usage restrictions. To me Mathematica is well worth its price tag, but I only came to that conclusion because I was able to experiment with it for free during college.
- oskarth 13y agoI found that it mostly works great, but sometimes it gives really wrong results - without any warnings. My professor complained about various errors too (mostly in dynamical systems, some control theory, but the problems seemed to be of a general sort), so it wasn't just a 40 cm error. To me this suggest that the language has plenty of leaky abstractions. My feeling is that in languages like python or julia, if you do something wrong you are more likely to hear about - and understand - it.
- asdkl234890 13y agobasically lisp with the biggest standard library you've ever imagined, That's what I was thinking too. And I also think it could mostly be re-implement as open source, with say Python.