Comment by yaroslavvb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yaroslavvb | Hacker News Reader

I've been using Mathematica since 1995 and Jupyter/colab for 5+ years. Most recently I've been using them both in parallel. While Jupyter is probably the future in terms of mass adoption, there are still some areas where Jupyter is lagging.

1. Mathematica has an easy way of sharing notebook. I just run "deploy" command which turns notebook into publicly accessible webpage, hosted by wolfram, here's an example -- https://www.wolframcloud.com/objects/user-eac9ee2d-7714-42da...

2. Mathematica has more active community. Mathematica-specific questions are likely to be answered within an hour by experts on https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/

3. Mathematica has better tools for simple interactivity. I like to throw in "Manipulate" for a simple graph with a draggable constant, or go to http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/index.php for an idea for more complicated demonstration to use in a presentation

4. Mathematica has more options for advanced visualization, and interfaces are more uniform since graph drawing, 3D drawing, and other kinds of visualizations are developed within a single system. Some examples https://www.wolfram.com/language/11/new-visualization-domain...

Thanks for your feedback, Mathematica has indeed millions of $ to provide more features and advertise them, and Jupyter have only a few full time devs that probably do not advertise enough its features:

1) Binder makes that a git push away https://mybinder.org/ Want to check the discovery of gravitational waves ? Go ahead ! https://github.com/minrk/ligo-binder You know the nice thing ? it does not require you to opt-in, as long as a repo is public you an run it. So you don't need have to deploy, or know it exists. we are _already_ doing that for you.

2) Jupyter is "Just" the frontend. StackOverflow have matpltlolib, numpy, sympy, .. tags. We don't the subdomain (yet), and I actually prefer to have tags to have better searching :-)

3) Sure it's called ipywidgets (https://ipywidgets.readthedocs.io/en/latest/), that's the tech. From ipywidgets import interact, and @interact as decorator on your function... that's it.

4) For convenience Library that use ipywidgets for 3D see https://ipyvolume.readthedocs.io/en/latest/animation.html (Hey it also support VR !) See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZ3HQpSXn2U that will blow your mind.

We'll try to be better at advertising our features !

MyBinder is great. As well as cocalc and sagemath. There's also https://notebooks.azure.com which is a free hosting of Jupyter notebooks. You get a linux/docker container w a Terminal, Anaconda, etc.

Check out jakevp's book for example:

https://notebooks.azure.com/jakevdp/libraries/PythonDataScie...

Clone to run.

Also try Jupyter Lab (experimental) - closer to an IDE than plain notebooks. right click on a Library (repo) and select Open in Jupyter Lab.

[disclaimer - our team's offering]

There’s also Google Colaboratory

With regards to sharing, both Google and Microsoft have free hosting for shareable jupyter notebooks. Probably not quite as easy to get them from your computer to the cloud as a deploy command, but it probably wouldn't be hard to create a module that does exactly that (if one doesn't already exist)

See https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/uk_faculty_connection/2017/... - you can easily import from Github

https://notebooks.azure.com

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