11 ms·

Mathematica 9 Is Released Today

93 points by lispython 14y ago

zackzackzack 14y ago
Some notable features: Call outs to R code http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/new-in-9/built-in-integration-with-r/ http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/new-in-9/built-in-integra... Social network analysis http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/new-in-9/social-network-analysis/ http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/new-in-9/social-network-a... Computation bar http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/new-in-9/next-computation-suggestions-bar/ http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/new-in-9/next-computation... Sigh. I dream of Mathematica being open source.
- 27182818284 14y ago
  >Sigh. I dream of Mathematica being open source. That's what Google's Brin was working on when he interned there.
  - jkn 14y ago
    Sergey Brin was only working on open sourcing the "pure language" part of it [1]. I share the dream of an open source Mathematica. It's so rich, elegant and powerful, using it would be a no-brainer. But in its present state? Nope. I've been bitten too many times by the proprietary nature of Matlab, in which I have invested a lot of work, to repeat the mistake. More specifically and from the top of my mind, I found that proprietary means: - I cannot run my code on my personal PC - some people I'm collaborating with cannot use my work - when I move to a different job, there is a good chance I cannot reuse my code - even when my new workstation (or my colleague's PC) does have the software installed, there is a good chance the version is incompatible with my code or the license doesn't include some toolbox I'm using - some work I want to make freely available is of no use to someone who cannot afford the software Notably absent from the list is the notion that I cannot check what is happening in the proprietary code. That is because the Matlab functions I needed to check were written in Matlab and perfectly readable. I'm sure the issue is real though, and I would be concerned if a new kind of science developed that produced results through opaque processes in closed source proprietary software. [1] http://www.bestofama.com/Stephen_Wolfram/qisot http://www.bestofama.com/Stephen_Wolfram/qisot
    - rplacd 14y ago
      > a new kind of science developed that produced results through opaque processes in closed source proprietary software. The amount of restraint you've just shown in describing NKS is superhuman.
    - taliesinb 14y ago
      Because most of Mathematica is written in Mathematica, you can actually introspect large parts of the codebase (by using DownValues). Try e.g.: DownValues[GraphPlot] Sometimes various symbols are 'ReadProtected', which prevents you from seeing their internal definition. But guess what? You can just Unprotect them and remove that attribute. And even introduce new definitions to monkey-patch the language! Only a smallish subset of the language is written in C (for speed). Edit: It's also kinda fun to use Names["*`*"] to see all the defined symbols in a fresh kernel -- there's a lot of hidden stuff there. Try Names["Internal`*"] Names["Developer`*"] to see some stuff the developers kept to themselves :)
      - jkn 14y ago
        Interesting! Most things I tried cannot be introspected though (e.g. DSolve, LaplaceTransform) and it's of course a far cry from a commented source file or notebook. Still, more than I thought was possible with Mathematica.
  - spitfire 14y ago
    The basic language is the easy bit. I've gotten the itch and written a sort-of-mathematica interpreter twice now. Each time I've gotten to the point where I can do basic derivatives/integrals/polynomials/etc and realized the real power is in the huge library (and brain trust behind that library) available to you. It really is quite enlightening to come back to other languages. It feels like you're going back to tin can and string communications. I am incredibly excited about the improvements for operations research markov chains and queueing, as well as timeseries. These will simplify my code hugely, better yet speed up work.
- ivanb 14y ago
  Sigh. I dream of Mathematica being open source. Take a look at Maxima then. It is a good system too but not even close in quality, features, etc.I blame its open source nature for this.
  - adityab 14y ago
    > I blame its open source nature for this. Why is it's open source nature to blame here? Can you elaborate? Is it the product vs. project argument?
    - ivanb 14y ago
      Yes, this is a product vs project argument. Products generally have a more intensive and focused effort. On the other hand the scientists which are the main users of Maxima may not be as willing to do or not be as good in development as developers themselves. In my not so humble opinion and only in my opinion open sourcing of Maxima (or Macsyma) put it in the wrong hands. Not to blame the actual developers of Maxima. Maxima is a very good project by itself just not as good as its commercial competitors.
      - dbaupp 14y ago
        Presumably the choice was to either open-source Maxima or stop development entirely and let it fall into obscurity. And anyway, having a(nother) open-source symbolic mathematical program is better than not having it, even if it is substandard compared to the commercial offerings.
      - jedbrown 14y ago
        Maxima's user base has long been minuscule compared to Mathematica and Maple. There are many factors that went into Maxima's present state, few of which I think are directly attributable to it being open source. There are plenty of open source projects that are more than competitive with their commercial counterparts, e.g., version control, Linux in the data center, R, many MPI-based HPC libraries.
  - brcrth 14y ago
- ksss 14y ago
  I would dream of Mathematica being something used as much as MS Excel. Available in any environment and a little bit easier to use for Excel users.
  - bloaf 14y ago
    I think Mathematica could make a killer excel add-in.
    - alok-g 14y ago
      Genuinely asking: Why? What use-cases or advantages do you have in mind?
    - rplacd 14y ago
      ExcelLink exists, but it inverses the flow of control - it spawns an inferior Excel.
      - alok-g 14y ago
        Just found MathematicaLink [1] while researching ExcelLink that allows access to Mathematica from Excel. [1] http://www.wolfram.com/products/applications/excel_link/features/mathematicalink.html http://www.wolfram.com/products/applications/excel_link/feat...
  - alok-g 14y ago
    Can you provide examples for the ideal case for you? What would you like to see in Mathematica to make it easier? As a heavy user of both, my experience is that Mathematica is more difficult initially when writing your code, but is ultimately easier than Excel because the thing you would be doing in Mathematica would be very hard to do in Excel (it is both a technical as well as maintenance nightmare).
- JulianMorrison 14y ago
  http://julialang.org/ http://julialang.org/ has potential.
- onan_barbarian 14y ago
  > Sigh. I dream of Mathematica being open source. I dream of a world where people don't compulsively fantasize that for any given piece of software, it should be supplanted by some other piece of software whose main differentiating feature is that it's a FOSS clone.
  - zackzackzack 14y ago
    I have no problem shelling out the money for the (student) license. I've worked at Wolfram and I could probably swing a free license anyway. There are already a variety of clones out there that can do some of what Mathematica already does. d3 and javascript can replicate some of the manipulate work. I mean, look at session: https://github.com/kovasb/session https://github.com/kovasb/session Mathematica being open source would mean that I could look at the source though and see what the hell is going on inside. I'd love to see how they are doing call outs to R and trace through all the interactions between the kernel, the user interface, and W|A. If it were open source, I could see the implementations of all the Mathematical algorithms and look at all the neat optimizations and new results they have found during their work. I care about the "math in Mathematica and am interested in seeing how it all works.
    - lshifr 14y ago
      All source code of RLink is available. The Java part is LGPL, and the Mathematica part is not, but is located at /SystemFiles/Links/RLink/RLink.m
ivanb 14y ago
For me this software project is one of the most admirable. The combination of the quality, expressiveness of the language, uniformity of the environment, cool algorithms and rich visualizations is a geek's delight. It is a pity that since I finished my university there is almost no place for this beautiful software project in my day to day life.
- ksss 14y ago
  Same for me. Most people in business around me use Excel and Matlab. I'd like to know how people on HNews use Mathematica. EDIT: Mathematica can do almost anything, but how do you use it actually in your work environment?
  - cschmidt 14y ago
    I use it mostly for exploratory data analysis. I'm pretty quick with making plots in it (I've used it since v1.2), so I tend to use it for reading in a data set, and them playing around with it. It can handle datasets in the hundreds of thousands of points (still in memory) pretty quickly. You can plot 200k points a series without it slowing down. On those rare occasions I need to solve equations or do some calculus, there's nothing better.
  - onedognight 14y ago
    Me too. I still use it quite frequently. One example where I've used it many times is to debug encryption algorithms. Mathematica can usually handle the most natural form of the Algorithm allowing you to compare the results with optimized low level code.
  - montecarl 14y ago
    I typically use Mathematica to prototype ideas. When they pan out, I integrate them with existing code written in c or Python. That Mathematica excels at symbolic manipulation as well as numerical solutions while having excellent visualization tools makes it invaluable. In particular I love to build up some complicated function of many variables and wrap a Plot[] command in a Manipulate[] command so that I can drag the slider bars around and see how the shape of the function changes. This allow for me to get an intuitive understanding of the problem.
PieSquared 14y ago
Wow. I am impressed not only by the new features, but also by that blog post. That was some really effective marketing! I'm particularly pleased by the addition of units. I can't count the number of times I've done some symbolic work in Mathematica, copied the results, pasted them into WolframAlpha, added numeric values and units, and then computed the value there. It's become a common refrain in my workflow and a rather annoying one at that, so I'm really glad they're integrating things from WA into real Mathematica.
- Osmium 14y ago
  Weren't units already in Mathematica 8? http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/Units/guide/UnitsPackage.html http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/Units/guide/UnitsPa... A lot of the new features fall short for me, e.g. face detection. Sure, it's nice to have over not having it at all, but when alternatives like OpenCV offer so much more functionality, why bother? I was trying to find an easy way to do facial landmark detection recently. If Mathematica included that by default, now that'd be a selling point. Also misleading is their new "audio spectrogram" feature. Wasn't this already available with their FFT functions? An actual useful feature would be, e.g., automatic formant detection from voice files. Often times, their new features list are just more nicely-packaged versions of existing features that in practice just save a line or two of code, rather than an feature that didn't exist at all before.
  - taliesinb 14y ago
    > Units If you read the blog post you'll see that the units support before 9 was 'tacked on' as a separate package. The units in 9 are much more extensive and flexible, and more importantly are integrated with other functions at a deep level. To give an example, if you find a solution to an equation that involves units, the solution will possess the correct units (and so on for curve fitting, etc..). > Face detection Having used both Mathematica and OpenCV for image processing, I challenge you to explain exactly how OpenCV goes "far beyond" Mathematica. Particularly in morphological processing and image component measurements, Mathematica is quite far ahead of OpenCV (in fact, Mathematica bundles OpenCV to do some of its image processing). However, OpenCV does expose more lower level stuff, and comes with some ML and object detection routines that Mathematica doesn't yet have. But the maximum speed at which you can prototype new algorithms in OpenCV is pretty darn painful. > Spectrogram The audio spectrogram is certainly not tacked on. Even doing a Short Time Fourier Transform yourself is far from easy (it is not equivalent to an ordinary FFT). Making it performant on large audio samples also requires some subsampling smarts. And doing a correct wavelet spectrogram is highly non-trivial, because the feature size depends on the frequency -- i.e. low frequencies have lower time resolution than higher frequencies. > No new content. Look at this list: http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/SummaryOfNewFeaturesIn90.html http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/SummaryOfNewF... There's a massive amount of new algorithmic content there. You can't seriously claim that, say, symbolic calculation of antisymmetric tensors and continuous Markov processes are 'just convenient wrapping'. Disclosure: I work at WRI, and love using Mathematica.
scottfr 14y ago
Anyone test it to see if it has reasonable undo/redo support yet? That alone would almost be reason enough to upgrade.
- scrumper 14y ago
  You're right, huge problem. At the very least I want to be able to undo/redo up to my last shift+enter.
- Too 14y ago
  Dito. This is a total show stopper. Only undoing your very last action and with no redo really sucks. I repeat that as it might sound like a joke to most people. There is no redo. And you can only undo one thing, where "one thing" might be typing a massive formula with all the correct mathematical notation or one full page of text. So if you undo your last 5 minutes of work because you thought you would undo one line or something there is no way to get it back. T________T If you deleting something inside that one thing you are currently typing, that deletion is also completely impossible to undo because if you do you will undo typing that entire block. (Undoing a small accidental delete is usually the cause of the scenario i described above)
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- taliesinb 14y ago
  Yeah, it kinda sucks -- mostly one learns to create new copies of definitions/code when doing substantial changes, which the notebook interface makes quite convenient. Or use a full blown editor like Eclipse. The holy grail as I see it would be storing the entire edit history of the document as a git-like tree of modifications, which is entirely possible because Mathematica notebooks are themselves built out of Mathematica expressions (see for example Cell http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/ref/Cell.html http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/ref/Cell.html). This would be similar to Rich Hickey's work on language-aware version control (http://blog.datomic.com/2012/10/codeq.html http://blog.datomic.com/2012/10/codeq.html)
- 14y ago
hxrts 14y ago
It's unfortunate that they restrict the number of cores according to license tier. I was excited about R integration, which is where I do a lot of parallel computations, until I realized this.
- taliesinb 14y ago
  M won't run if your machine has more than a certain number of cores, or you'll only be able to fill a subset of them with M kernels? I suspect the number of cores available to the slave R process is unrestricted because it runs separately.
- programnature 14y ago
  I doubt that limit affects your use case. The limit is on the number of mathematica mathkernel processes, not on the number of processes the kernel calls out to. Though, it likely takes some fiddling to set up numerous R processes per mathematica mathkernel.
snprbob86 14y ago
Despite the overwhelming sense of ego that pervades every word Wolfram and his organization ever writes, you owe it to yourself to try Mathematica. When I had first encountered Mathematica in college, I thought "this is neat", used it for a few calculations, and forgot about it. Fast forward to a few months ago and I decided to install a demo just to learn about term rewriting and pattern matching. What I discovered blew my mind: It's just a lisp! Every expression has a "head", which is just a namespaced symbol. FullForm[x+y+z] is really just Plus[x,y,z] and Head[Plus[x,y,z]] is simply Plus. Squint, and it looks like (+ x y z) to me... The really interesting part is that the entire computational library is built around term rewriting. While there is mutable state, it exists almost primarily at the symbol definition level. Everything else is pretty much pattern matching on trees of symbols. Even the rendered output is just a drawn representation of a box-oriented markup built out of Mathematica forms. It's quite amazing.
- bitwize 14y ago
  Wasn't Wolfram the guy who said that Lisp was completely inadequate for mathematical computing, being too slow by a factor of 100 or summat? Mathematica owes much of its lineage to Macsyma, a computer algebra system that really was Lisp on the inside; its spiritual descendant, Maxima, is written in CL.
  - snprbob86 14y ago
    Wolfram seems to have a penchant for hyperbole. However, at the time, that was likely true. My understanding is that v1 of Mathematica really was just a rewrite of Macsyma in C.
    - taliesinb 14y ago
      I suspect you are thinking of SMP, which was Wolfram's first attempt at a symbolic language: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_Manipulation_Program http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_Manipulation_Program
  - tzs 14y ago
    Source for the following: personal recollection from when I was an undergraduate at Caltech. I had a part time job as a systems programmer/admin at CITHEP (Caltech High Energy Physics), mostly dealing with their VAX-11/780, at the time that Wolfram was using that machine to develop the predecessor or Mathematica. Wolfram and Chris Cole started developing a symbolic math system, which they named Symbolic Manipulation Program (SMP), when they found that Macsyma was unable to handle the computational needs for their physics research. For problems that they considered to be medium problems, Macsyma could do the work, but it was very slow. For problems that they considered to be large problems, Macsyma ran out of memory. Thus, they needed something more efficient in both time and space. Wolfram and Cole planned on writing in C. They asked researchers in the symbolic computation community about this, and were told that it was a terrible idea. C was too low level. To do a high level system like a symbolic algebra system, you had to work at a much higher level. Using anything less than Lisp pretty much guaranteed your project would take forever. Wolfram and Cole decided on C anyway. (BTW, C at CITHEP was not quite standard C. Norman Wilson had hacked the compiler to handle float and double expressions the same way FORTRAN handled them, making C almost as good as FORTRAN for numerical work, and C had mostly taken over from FORTRAN for physics computation there). I recall seeing the factor of 100 number, or something like that, in one of the first public presentations of SMP. On the research problems that Wolfram and Cole considered to be medium sized, SMP was beating the Lisp-based systems by around a factor of 100.
scrumper 14y ago
Mathematica is also by far the easiest language for solving Project Euler problems. There's almost a function call for each problem. It feels far too much like cheating but it's a good way to learn the language.
sn6uv 14y ago
For those in search of a FOSS alternative, give Mathics a try: www.mathics.org In the past couple of months, Mathics had made quite a lot of progress.In particular the upcoming release will run on PyPy. Obviously it still had lots of catching up to do, but being written in python (and some Mathematica) makes development easy and fast. Come join us! Disclaimer: Mathics vice dictator here
- andrewcooke 14y ago
  http://www.mathics.net/ http://www.mathics.net/ (try on-line) gives a 502
  - sn6uv 14y ago
    Apparently it couldn't withstand all the traffic from HN (potentially due to all the server side python). It's up again now. You can always download it and try it locally: http://www.mathics.org http://www.mathics.org Edit: If anyone is interested in getting involved, we are always looking for contributers. The full code is on github: https://github.com/poeschko/Mathics https://github.com/poeschko/Mathics
    - andrewcooke 14y ago
      wow. just looking now; that's really impressive.
- taliesinb 14y ago
  Mathics is pretty impressive. Nice work!
Osmium 14y ago
Any news on if the OS X GUI is still Carbon-based? Was hoping the new version would be Retina-ready.
- taliesinb 14y ago
  Yeah, I make noise about this all the time. Hopefully there is not too much legacy burden in switching to Cocoa.
  - HSO 14y ago
    Try the "retinizer" utility: http://retinizer.mikelpr.com http://retinizer.mikelpr.com ! I used this to "retina-fy" Mathematica and it worked, the notebooks are clear now.
    - Osmium 14y ago
      I tried it. It made my notebooks nice and crisp, but introduced weird black artefacts with the menu panels. Did you get that too or do they work fine for you?
      - taliesinb 14y ago
        Yes, I see the same thing, but it does work remarkably well aside from that! Thanks for the tip, HSO!
Osmium 14y ago
Thanks Wolfram for not letting me upgrade. Website claims "up to 80% upgrade savings!" but when I enter my activation code, I'm told I'm not eligible. I bought a 1-year license just a few months ago for version 8. Only £36, sure, but I'm a student and can't afford a second £36 now just for a handful of new features, even if they would be useful. Upgrade pricing would be nice. I'm sure working out a fair upgrade price shouldn't be too hard either. I bet there's even a formula for it somewhere...
- taliesinb 14y ago
  Talk to customer support. I think they're pretty good about helping out students.
frozenport 14y ago
Is Mathematic customer driven? I see many baroque details, but I can't imagine them being used often. Graphs and parameters and models that look very specialized: but in many of these cases I know people use Matlab or C. I use Matlab. How does Steve choose which features to add?
- taliesinb 14y ago
  On the contrary -- graphs (networks, not plots), statistical distributions, and random processes are everywhere in almost every industry. It is just that the current tools for working with them are currently so hyper-specialized to each individual field that they are 'ghettos' that most smart, general-purpose developers never enter. We're all blind to things our current tools don't permit us to explore. As a random example, I bet that many cloud-based services could (but probably don't) do reliability analysis of their services under different independence assumptions. Are the weak links what you thought they were? What if you updated your model as various things failed / rolled over, so that you could run to put out the fires that are most likely to burn the whole village down? For a modest organization a smart intern could probably put this together with Mathematica in a couple of weeks.
philip1209 14y ago
I maintain that my Mathematica license should include access to Wolfram Alpha Pro.
splicer 14y ago
The Wolfram Predictive Interface™ sounds a lot like Clippy.
- stevenbedrick 14y ago
  That was my first thought as well, but after playing around with it all afternoon, I'd say that I'm "cautiously optimistic". It's quite snappy, and they clearly put a lot of thought into optimizing what it shows and when. It would have been super-helpful when I was first getting started with MMA, and as an experienced user I'm finding myself using it more than I would have expected. My one gripe thus far is that there isn't as much keyboard control over the prediction interface as I'd like, but that could just be that I haven't found the shortcuts yet. One thing I quite like about it is that there's a built-in "feedback" feature- any time the "predictive UI bar" is showing, there's a button you can press to send semi-structured feedback about what's currently showing, suggest other things you'd like to appear in similar situations, and so on. I've used it already to suggest a few changes the prediction UI for ListPlot.

93 points by lispython 14y ago

Some notable features: Call outs to R code http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/new-in-9/built-in-integration-with-r/ http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/new-in-9/built-in-integra... Social network analysis http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/new-in-9/social-network-analysis/ http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/new-in-9/social-network-a... Computation bar http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/new-in-9/next-computation-suggestions-bar/ http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/new-in-9/next-computation... Sigh. I dream of Mathematica being open source.

27182818284 14y ago
>Sigh. I dream of Mathematica being open source. That's what Google's Brin was working on when he interned there.
- jkn 14y ago
  Sergey Brin was only working on open sourcing the "pure language" part of it [1]. I share the dream of an open source Mathematica. It's so rich, elegant and powerful, using it would be a no-brainer. But in its present state? Nope. I've been bitten too many times by the proprietary nature of Matlab, in which I have invested a lot of work, to repeat the mistake. More specifically and from the top of my mind, I found that proprietary means: - I cannot run my code on my personal PC - some people I'm collaborating with cannot use my work - when I move to a different job, there is a good chance I cannot reuse my code - even when my new workstation (or my colleague's PC) does have the software installed, there is a good chance the version is incompatible with my code or the license doesn't include some toolbox I'm using - some work I want to make freely available is of no use to someone who cannot afford the software Notably absent from the list is the notion that I cannot check what is happening in the proprietary code. That is because the Matlab functions I needed to check were written in Matlab and perfectly readable. I'm sure the issue is real though, and I would be concerned if a new kind of science developed that produced results through opaque processes in closed source proprietary software. [1] http://www.bestofama.com/Stephen_Wolfram/qisot http://www.bestofama.com/Stephen_Wolfram/qisot
  - rplacd 14y ago
    > a new kind of science developed that produced results through opaque processes in closed source proprietary software. The amount of restraint you've just shown in describing NKS is superhuman.
  - taliesinb 14y ago
    Because most of Mathematica is written in Mathematica, you can actually introspect large parts of the codebase (by using DownValues). Try e.g.: DownValues[GraphPlot] Sometimes various symbols are 'ReadProtected', which prevents you from seeing their internal definition. But guess what? You can just Unprotect them and remove that attribute. And even introduce new definitions to monkey-patch the language! Only a smallish subset of the language is written in C (for speed). Edit: It's also kinda fun to use Names["*`*"] to see all the defined symbols in a fresh kernel -- there's a lot of hidden stuff there. Try Names["Internal`*"] Names["Developer`*"] to see some stuff the developers kept to themselves :)
    - jkn 14y ago
      Interesting! Most things I tried cannot be introspected though (e.g. DSolve, LaplaceTransform) and it's of course a far cry from a commented source file or notebook. Still, more than I thought was possible with Mathematica.
- spitfire 14y ago
  The basic language is the easy bit. I've gotten the itch and written a sort-of-mathematica interpreter twice now. Each time I've gotten to the point where I can do basic derivatives/integrals/polynomials/etc and realized the real power is in the huge library (and brain trust behind that library) available to you. It really is quite enlightening to come back to other languages. It feels like you're going back to tin can and string communications. I am incredibly excited about the improvements for operations research markov chains and queueing, as well as timeseries. These will simplify my code hugely, better yet speed up work.
ivanb 14y ago
Sigh. I dream of Mathematica being open source. Take a look at Maxima then. It is a good system too but not even close in quality, features, etc.I blame its open source nature for this.
- adityab 14y ago
  > I blame its open source nature for this. Why is it's open source nature to blame here? Can you elaborate? Is it the product vs. project argument?
  - ivanb 14y ago
    Yes, this is a product vs project argument. Products generally have a more intensive and focused effort. On the other hand the scientists which are the main users of Maxima may not be as willing to do or not be as good in development as developers themselves. In my not so humble opinion and only in my opinion open sourcing of Maxima (or Macsyma) put it in the wrong hands. Not to blame the actual developers of Maxima. Maxima is a very good project by itself just not as good as its commercial competitors.
    - dbaupp 14y ago
      Presumably the choice was to either open-source Maxima or stop development entirely and let it fall into obscurity. And anyway, having a(nother) open-source symbolic mathematical program is better than not having it, even if it is substandard compared to the commercial offerings.
    - jedbrown 14y ago
      Maxima's user base has long been minuscule compared to Mathematica and Maple. There are many factors that went into Maxima's present state, few of which I think are directly attributable to it being open source. There are plenty of open source projects that are more than competitive with their commercial counterparts, e.g., version control, Linux in the data center, R, many MPI-based HPC libraries.
- brcrth 14y ago
ksss 14y ago
I would dream of Mathematica being something used as much as MS Excel. Available in any environment and a little bit easier to use for Excel users.
- bloaf 14y ago
  I think Mathematica could make a killer excel add-in.
  - alok-g 14y ago
    Genuinely asking: Why? What use-cases or advantages do you have in mind?
  - rplacd 14y ago
    ExcelLink exists, but it inverses the flow of control - it spawns an inferior Excel.
    - alok-g 14y ago
      Just found MathematicaLink [1] while researching ExcelLink that allows access to Mathematica from Excel. [1] http://www.wolfram.com/products/applications/excel_link/features/mathematicalink.html http://www.wolfram.com/products/applications/excel_link/feat...
- alok-g 14y ago
  Can you provide examples for the ideal case for you? What would you like to see in Mathematica to make it easier? As a heavy user of both, my experience is that Mathematica is more difficult initially when writing your code, but is ultimately easier than Excel because the thing you would be doing in Mathematica would be very hard to do in Excel (it is both a technical as well as maintenance nightmare).
JulianMorrison 14y ago
http://julialang.org/ http://julialang.org/ has potential.
onan_barbarian 14y ago
> Sigh. I dream of Mathematica being open source. I dream of a world where people don't compulsively fantasize that for any given piece of software, it should be supplanted by some other piece of software whose main differentiating feature is that it's a FOSS clone.
- zackzackzack 14y ago
  I have no problem shelling out the money for the (student) license. I've worked at Wolfram and I could probably swing a free license anyway. There are already a variety of clones out there that can do some of what Mathematica already does. d3 and javascript can replicate some of the manipulate work. I mean, look at session: https://github.com/kovasb/session https://github.com/kovasb/session Mathematica being open source would mean that I could look at the source though and see what the hell is going on inside. I'd love to see how they are doing call outs to R and trace through all the interactions between the kernel, the user interface, and W|A. If it were open source, I could see the implementations of all the Mathematical algorithms and look at all the neat optimizations and new results they have found during their work. I care about the "math in Mathematica and am interested in seeing how it all works.
  - lshifr 14y ago
    All source code of RLink is available. The Java part is LGPL, and the Mathematica part is not, but is located at /SystemFiles/Links/RLink/RLink.m

ivanb 14y ago

For me this software project is one of the most admirable. The combination of the quality, expressiveness of the language, uniformity of the environment, cool algorithms and rich visualizations is a geek's delight. It is a pity that since I finished my university there is almost no place for this beautiful software project in my day to day life.

ksss 14y ago
Same for me. Most people in business around me use Excel and Matlab. I'd like to know how people on HNews use Mathematica. EDIT: Mathematica can do almost anything, but how do you use it actually in your work environment?
- cschmidt 14y ago
  I use it mostly for exploratory data analysis. I'm pretty quick with making plots in it (I've used it since v1.2), so I tend to use it for reading in a data set, and them playing around with it. It can handle datasets in the hundreds of thousands of points (still in memory) pretty quickly. You can plot 200k points a series without it slowing down. On those rare occasions I need to solve equations or do some calculus, there's nothing better.
- onedognight 14y ago
  Me too. I still use it quite frequently. One example where I've used it many times is to debug encryption algorithms. Mathematica can usually handle the most natural form of the Algorithm allowing you to compare the results with optimized low level code.
- montecarl 14y ago
  I typically use Mathematica to prototype ideas. When they pan out, I integrate them with existing code written in c or Python. That Mathematica excels at symbolic manipulation as well as numerical solutions while having excellent visualization tools makes it invaluable. In particular I love to build up some complicated function of many variables and wrap a Plot[] command in a Manipulate[] command so that I can drag the slider bars around and see how the shape of the function changes. This allow for me to get an intuitive understanding of the problem.

PieSquared 14y ago

Wow. I am impressed not only by the new features, but also by that blog post. That was some really effective marketing! I'm particularly pleased by the addition of units. I can't count the number of times I've done some symbolic work in Mathematica, copied the results, pasted them into WolframAlpha, added numeric values and units, and then computed the value there. It's become a common refrain in my workflow and a rather annoying one at that, so I'm really glad they're integrating things from WA into real Mathematica.

Osmium 14y ago
Weren't units already in Mathematica 8? http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/Units/guide/UnitsPackage.html http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/Units/guide/UnitsPa... A lot of the new features fall short for me, e.g. face detection. Sure, it's nice to have over not having it at all, but when alternatives like OpenCV offer so much more functionality, why bother? I was trying to find an easy way to do facial landmark detection recently. If Mathematica included that by default, now that'd be a selling point. Also misleading is their new "audio spectrogram" feature. Wasn't this already available with their FFT functions? An actual useful feature would be, e.g., automatic formant detection from voice files. Often times, their new features list are just more nicely-packaged versions of existing features that in practice just save a line or two of code, rather than an feature that didn't exist at all before.
- taliesinb 14y ago
  > Units If you read the blog post you'll see that the units support before 9 was 'tacked on' as a separate package. The units in 9 are much more extensive and flexible, and more importantly are integrated with other functions at a deep level. To give an example, if you find a solution to an equation that involves units, the solution will possess the correct units (and so on for curve fitting, etc..). > Face detection Having used both Mathematica and OpenCV for image processing, I challenge you to explain exactly how OpenCV goes "far beyond" Mathematica. Particularly in morphological processing and image component measurements, Mathematica is quite far ahead of OpenCV (in fact, Mathematica bundles OpenCV to do some of its image processing). However, OpenCV does expose more lower level stuff, and comes with some ML and object detection routines that Mathematica doesn't yet have. But the maximum speed at which you can prototype new algorithms in OpenCV is pretty darn painful. > Spectrogram The audio spectrogram is certainly not tacked on. Even doing a Short Time Fourier Transform yourself is far from easy (it is not equivalent to an ordinary FFT). Making it performant on large audio samples also requires some subsampling smarts. And doing a correct wavelet spectrogram is highly non-trivial, because the feature size depends on the frequency -- i.e. low frequencies have lower time resolution than higher frequencies. > No new content. Look at this list: http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/SummaryOfNewFeaturesIn90.html http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/SummaryOfNewF... There's a massive amount of new algorithmic content there. You can't seriously claim that, say, symbolic calculation of antisymmetric tensors and continuous Markov processes are 'just convenient wrapping'. Disclosure: I work at WRI, and love using Mathematica.

scottfr 14y ago

Anyone test it to see if it has reasonable undo/redo support yet? That alone would almost be reason enough to upgrade.

scrumper 14y ago
You're right, huge problem. At the very least I want to be able to undo/redo up to my last shift+enter.
Too 14y ago
Dito. This is a total show stopper. Only undoing your very last action and with no redo really sucks. I repeat that as it might sound like a joke to most people. There is no redo. And you can only undo one thing, where "one thing" might be typing a massive formula with all the correct mathematical notation or one full page of text. So if you undo your last 5 minutes of work because you thought you would undo one line or something there is no way to get it back. T________T If you deleting something inside that one thing you are currently typing, that deletion is also completely impossible to undo because if you do you will undo typing that entire block. (Undoing a small accidental delete is usually the cause of the scenario i described above)
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
taliesinb 14y ago
Yeah, it kinda sucks -- mostly one learns to create new copies of definitions/code when doing substantial changes, which the notebook interface makes quite convenient. Or use a full blown editor like Eclipse. The holy grail as I see it would be storing the entire edit history of the document as a git-like tree of modifications, which is entirely possible because Mathematica notebooks are themselves built out of Mathematica expressions (see for example Cell http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/ref/Cell.html http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/ref/Cell.html). This would be similar to Rich Hickey's work on language-aware version control (http://blog.datomic.com/2012/10/codeq.html http://blog.datomic.com/2012/10/codeq.html)
14y ago

hxrts 14y ago

It's unfortunate that they restrict the number of cores according to license tier. I was excited about R integration, which is where I do a lot of parallel computations, until I realized this.

taliesinb 14y ago
M won't run if your machine has more than a certain number of cores, or you'll only be able to fill a subset of them with M kernels? I suspect the number of cores available to the slave R process is unrestricted because it runs separately.
programnature 14y ago
I doubt that limit affects your use case. The limit is on the number of mathematica mathkernel processes, not on the number of processes the kernel calls out to. Though, it likely takes some fiddling to set up numerous R processes per mathematica mathkernel.

snprbob86 14y ago

Despite the overwhelming sense of ego that pervades every word Wolfram and his organization ever writes, you owe it to yourself to try Mathematica. When I had first encountered Mathematica in college, I thought "this is neat", used it for a few calculations, and forgot about it. Fast forward to a few months ago and I decided to install a demo just to learn about term rewriting and pattern matching. What I discovered blew my mind: It's just a lisp! Every expression has a "head", which is just a namespaced symbol. FullForm[x+y+z] is really just Plus[x,y,z] and Head[Plus[x,y,z]] is simply Plus. Squint, and it looks like (+ x y z) to me... The really interesting part is that the entire computational library is built around term rewriting. While there is mutable state, it exists almost primarily at the symbol definition level. Everything else is pretty much pattern matching on trees of symbols. Even the rendered output is just a drawn representation of a box-oriented markup built out of Mathematica forms. It's quite amazing.

bitwize 14y ago
Wasn't Wolfram the guy who said that Lisp was completely inadequate for mathematical computing, being too slow by a factor of 100 or summat? Mathematica owes much of its lineage to Macsyma, a computer algebra system that really was Lisp on the inside; its spiritual descendant, Maxima, is written in CL.
- snprbob86 14y ago
  Wolfram seems to have a penchant for hyperbole. However, at the time, that was likely true. My understanding is that v1 of Mathematica really was just a rewrite of Macsyma in C.
  - taliesinb 14y ago
    I suspect you are thinking of SMP, which was Wolfram's first attempt at a symbolic language: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_Manipulation_Program http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_Manipulation_Program
- tzs 14y ago
  Source for the following: personal recollection from when I was an undergraduate at Caltech. I had a part time job as a systems programmer/admin at CITHEP (Caltech High Energy Physics), mostly dealing with their VAX-11/780, at the time that Wolfram was using that machine to develop the predecessor or Mathematica. Wolfram and Chris Cole started developing a symbolic math system, which they named Symbolic Manipulation Program (SMP), when they found that Macsyma was unable to handle the computational needs for their physics research. For problems that they considered to be medium problems, Macsyma could do the work, but it was very slow. For problems that they considered to be large problems, Macsyma ran out of memory. Thus, they needed something more efficient in both time and space. Wolfram and Cole planned on writing in C. They asked researchers in the symbolic computation community about this, and were told that it was a terrible idea. C was too low level. To do a high level system like a symbolic algebra system, you had to work at a much higher level. Using anything less than Lisp pretty much guaranteed your project would take forever. Wolfram and Cole decided on C anyway. (BTW, C at CITHEP was not quite standard C. Norman Wilson had hacked the compiler to handle float and double expressions the same way FORTRAN handled them, making C almost as good as FORTRAN for numerical work, and C had mostly taken over from FORTRAN for physics computation there). I recall seeing the factor of 100 number, or something like that, in one of the first public presentations of SMP. On the research problems that Wolfram and Cole considered to be medium sized, SMP was beating the Lisp-based systems by around a factor of 100.

scrumper 14y ago

Mathematica is also by far the easiest language for solving Project Euler problems. There's almost a function call for each problem. It feels far too much like cheating but it's a good way to learn the language.

sn6uv 14y ago

For those in search of a FOSS alternative, give Mathics a try: www.mathics.org In the past couple of months, Mathics had made quite a lot of progress.In particular the upcoming release will run on PyPy. Obviously it still had lots of catching up to do, but being written in python (and some Mathematica) makes development easy and fast. Come join us! Disclaimer: Mathics vice dictator here

andrewcooke 14y ago
http://www.mathics.net/ http://www.mathics.net/ (try on-line) gives a 502
- sn6uv 14y ago
  Apparently it couldn't withstand all the traffic from HN (potentially due to all the server side python). It's up again now. You can always download it and try it locally: http://www.mathics.org http://www.mathics.org Edit: If anyone is interested in getting involved, we are always looking for contributers. The full code is on github: https://github.com/poeschko/Mathics https://github.com/poeschko/Mathics
  - andrewcooke 14y ago
    wow. just looking now; that's really impressive.
taliesinb 14y ago
Mathics is pretty impressive. Nice work!

Osmium 14y ago

Any news on if the OS X GUI is still Carbon-based? Was hoping the new version would be Retina-ready.

taliesinb 14y ago
Yeah, I make noise about this all the time. Hopefully there is not too much legacy burden in switching to Cocoa.
- HSO 14y ago
  Try the "retinizer" utility: http://retinizer.mikelpr.com http://retinizer.mikelpr.com ! I used this to "retina-fy" Mathematica and it worked, the notebooks are clear now.
  - Osmium 14y ago
    I tried it. It made my notebooks nice and crisp, but introduced weird black artefacts with the menu panels. Did you get that too or do they work fine for you?
    - taliesinb 14y ago
      Yes, I see the same thing, but it does work remarkably well aside from that! Thanks for the tip, HSO!

Osmium 14y ago

Thanks Wolfram for not letting me upgrade. Website claims "up to 80% upgrade savings!" but when I enter my activation code, I'm told I'm not eligible. I bought a 1-year license just a few months ago for version 8. Only £36, sure, but I'm a student and can't afford a second £36 now just for a handful of new features, even if they would be useful. Upgrade pricing would be nice. I'm sure working out a fair upgrade price shouldn't be too hard either. I bet there's even a formula for it somewhere...

taliesinb 14y ago
Talk to customer support. I think they're pretty good about helping out students.

frozenport 14y ago

Is Mathematic customer driven? I see many baroque details, but I can't imagine them being used often. Graphs and parameters and models that look very specialized: but in many of these cases I know people use Matlab or C. I use Matlab. How does Steve choose which features to add?

taliesinb 14y ago
On the contrary -- graphs (networks, not plots), statistical distributions, and random processes are everywhere in almost every industry. It is just that the current tools for working with them are currently so hyper-specialized to each individual field that they are 'ghettos' that most smart, general-purpose developers never enter. We're all blind to things our current tools don't permit us to explore. As a random example, I bet that many cloud-based services could (but probably don't) do reliability analysis of their services under different independence assumptions. Are the weak links what you thought they were? What if you updated your model as various things failed / rolled over, so that you could run to put out the fires that are most likely to burn the whole village down? For a modest organization a smart intern could probably put this together with Mathematica in a couple of weeks.

philip1209 14y ago

I maintain that my Mathematica license should include access to Wolfram Alpha Pro.

splicer 14y ago

The Wolfram Predictive Interface™ sounds a lot like Clippy.

stevenbedrick 14y ago
That was my first thought as well, but after playing around with it all afternoon, I'd say that I'm "cautiously optimistic". It's quite snappy, and they clearly put a lot of thought into optimizing what it shows and when. It would have been super-helpful when I was first getting started with MMA, and as an experienced user I'm finding myself using it more than I would have expected. My one gripe thus far is that there isn't as much keyboard control over the prediction interface as I'd like, but that could just be that I haven't found the shortcuts yet. One thing I quite like about it is that there's a built-in "feedback" feature- any time the "predictive UI bar" is showing, there's a button you can press to send semi-structured feedback about what's currently showing, suggest other things you'd like to appear in similar situations, and so on. I've used it already to suggest a few changes the prediction UI for ListPlot.