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Comment by delish | Hacker News Reader

I recommend that Stephen Wolfram skeptics read this press release. I was surprised by language-level support for 3D printing:

    In Version 11 it’s finally realistic to take any 3D plot, and just 3D print it.

I didn't know that I wanted this until I saw it. Generally I prefer small, simple languages. But Mathematica is my favorite large language.

I'm also happy that, even though Mathematica 11 introduces flashy features like 3D printing support and a Logo-derivative, it also includes improved support for calculus. Is there anyone else like Wolfram, i.e. a math-person who presides over a very-pragmatic, very-large programming language? That's not a rhetorical question.

A question for Mathematica-folk: does Mathematica have support for direct manipulation like Toby Schachman's works?[] I find direct manipulation more pleasant than typing characters.

[] http://tobyschachman.com/

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William Stein, number theorist at University of Washington, founded and built up Sage. It's designed to be cloud-based and acts as a common interface for many things (including Mathematica, Maple, Matlab, etc.) but also has it's own libraries. Will recently went on leave from UW to work full time on Sage.

Description from: http://www.sagemath.org/

"SageMath is a free open-source mathematics software system licensed under the GPL. It builds on top of many existing open-source packages: NumPy, SciPy, matplotlib, Sympy, Maxima, GAP, FLINT, R and many more. Access their combined power through a common, Python-based language or directly via interfaces or wrappers. Mission: Creating a viable free open source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica and Matlab."

> Generally I prefer small, simple languages.

I would argue that MMA is a small language hiding behind a gigantic, domain-specific library.

Yes. Wolfram is a small language, with the world's largest standard library.

It helps that the huge library has some of the best documentation I've ever encountered.

If a massive standard library, or really any library, doesn't have good documentation how do you find out about it?

In some statically typed languages like C# and Java you can use an IDE's object or interface explorer to see what the classes, methods, and properties of a class lib are. If that's missing do you have to use introspection or reflection? In a REPL if the language has one?

Is it assumed a compiled language will be statically typed (though that doesn't have to be true) and if it's not the source code will come with any library so examining it is easy?

The thing is, the entire standard library is in the default namespace. I personally dislike that, but then again, I was raised on python.

For those that haven't used Mma, the uppercase/lowercase convention helps a lot here. Built in functions start with uppercase letters, like LinearProgramming. You should name your functions with a lowercase letter. So the namespace is messy, but you're never going to accidentally collide with a built in name.

> A question for Mathematica-folk: does Mathematica have support for direct manipulation like Toby Schachman's works?[] I find direct manipulation more pleasant than typing characters.

Locator comes to mind:

https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/Locator.html

https://youtu.be/6wOLBVFdek8?t=11s

And more generally Manipulate which makes it easy to whip together a let-me-explore-how-this-depends-on-that type of widget.

check out demonstrations.wolfram.com too - it's a place you can put manipulations if you want to use them in a class, etc

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