Comment by throwaway7645 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway7645 | Hacker News Reader

So only a little off topic, but does anyone here use the Wolfram language and Mathematica for research and common coding tasks? I've been pleasantly surprised so far with the depth of the language (the import statement is a single unified way to import everything from CSV, text, excel files, mathematical optimization (.mps) files, graphviz dot files...etc). I'm just starting to use it and the fact that you can wrap a oneliner in a single command to turn it into an interactive widget with a slider, or convert it to C code, JIT it, or run it in parallel or on a GPU is crazily well integrated. I love python (open source and free instead of proprietary and expensive), but in Python every one of those things is a separate library if it exists. I've always known about Cython/Jython/PyPy, but that requires a lot more effort to utilize in the same way.

Wolfram Alpha [1] is another tool from them that's simply phenomenal for a multitude of purposes, including research. It's what I'd really like to see in a search eventually. It tries to actually directly deliver answers instead of correlating searches to a prioritized list of websites which is slowly degenerating search into 'search trendy websites by keyword.' For instance search google for "price of google stock in 2009", and then do the same search on Wolfram Alpha.

As that project evolves, it could eventually be the sort of searchable knowledge database that would render current search obsolete. Google itself could be a literal query of 'list high traffic SEO'd sites that mention [search term]'. Who actually wants that result other than the sites in question, ...and the companies that profit from their advertising, is beyond me.

[1] - https://www.wolframalpha.com/

Yea I used it a bit in college. It is pretty neat when it has the information you need, but a lot of people are using proprietary information not on the public wolfram alpha cloud. So Alpha is a little gimmicky to me although great for helping with homework.

i want to use it but its a really expensive tool. I have had a few companies buy it for me, but i'm mostly coding in giant c++ and java code bases so there's just never a reason to use it. If I was coding on my own it would be great.

Yep, as someone not writing production code it is pretty awesome as a personal productivity tool.

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