New version of Mathematica released
blog.wolfram.com
blog.wolfram.com
The signal-to-noise ratio of that article is incredible low. What did I get out of the post?
- You can now type wolframalpha-style in mathematica.
- You now have over 3000 built-in functions (i.e., too many to remember ;)
The rest was just Wolfram telling the world in many different ways how great mathematica was/is/will be. Adjectives include: huge, important, dramatic, breakthrough, major, slow & lumbering (to describe others), etc. Hell, "great" is mentioned 6 times in the post!
Alternatives like Matlab, Maple, Stata all have basically the same 'look' to their default graphing packages.
Even though Mathematica would not be the right choice for statistical processing, the graphs it produces are a step above the rest.
So depends what you're use case is.. any of the above would look good enough for an academic paper. But if you're going to be publishing these in a magazine, they probably won't cut it.
If you include CRAN packages, then this couldn't be further from the truth: http://addictedtor.free.fr/graphiques/
R can be made to produce beautiful visualizations.
Edit: here's a link to the top-voted thumbnails of R visualization: http://addictedtor.free.fr/graphiques/thumbs.php?sort=votes
IMO, since it can be scripted from the command line, it's high time Gnuplot died a graceful death.
The only thing that makes tufte-quality visualizations in my experience is hand-building your graphs in tikz.
The graphs you linked to are hideous from an aesthetics point of view; font's are ugly, data:ink ratio far too low, color choices poor etc.
Matplotlib (http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/) is actually the best opensource library for creating great looking graphs that I have come across, and is comparable to Matlab and Mathematica.
Compare to:
http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/weather-stations-data/
http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/rna-codons-table/
The beauty of tex font's + vector graphics is impressive. Try zooming in on the sparklines in the first example
Of course, any of this is a time investment, but I'd say the only alternative is Matlab - S-plus is stupidly expensive and no better than R, Stata is a pain for any sort of automated processing, SAS is overpriced by an order of magnitude with a hideous learning curve for functionality that lags 10 years behind R, and Mathematica is brand new to the market. Let someone else work out the kinks.
I have used R for projects, but quite a few researchers I know use SPSS.
One important thing to know about SPSS- that a lot of people don't- is that is really a programming language, for which the GUI is simply a code generator. I find that it's almost always easier for me to interact directly with the under-the-hood guts of SPSS than the GUI, although sometimes when setting up a new analysis for the first time I'll use the GUI to do most of the work and then tweak its results.
If your stats needs are relatively simple- linear models, glms, logit models, anovas, simple tests of hypotheses, etc.- MMA is more than adequate. The new version looks like it adds some non-parametric stats functions, as well as paired t-tests, both of which would be quite useful to me.
Also, the visualization tool in MMA are fabulous, and don't make me want to tear my beard out every time I have to go off the beaten path (as opposed to those found in certain other one-letter-long stats environments I could name). 'Nuff said. Another thing I really appreciate about MMA is how consistent the syntax and functions are- once you've figured out one function, the odds are good that your knowledge will be useful on the next function you try and figure out. This, again, stands in stark contrast to other packages (R, SAS, I'm looking at you guys).
I have found myself turning to R for certain specific things, though. Mixed-effects models, repeated-measure ANOVA, Fisher's Exact Test, etc. Really, the two work together well- it's easy to use MMA to get your data in exactly the right form for R, export it, and then do whatever you need from there.
Now, its heritage shows quite a bit, and the language is not always nice to play with. It has great plotting facilities ala ggplot: http://had.co.nz/ggplot, which is a very interesting way to look at data visualizaton in a principled way.
There are also quite a few things available in scipy if python is your thing. If you just want to do stats and are not familiar with python nor want to deal with a general programming languge, R is better I think. If you want to make full-fledged applis with a web-fronted, R will not be pleasant :) {usual disclaimer: I am a numpy/scipy contributor).
Example:
Hold[Times[1,2]] /. (Times -> Plus)Also I agree with a poster below: this press release is really low on the signal-to-noise.
That being said I've met some really great Mathematica programmers, and the stuff they can make that program do with only a few dozen lines of code is truly amazing.
I'm curious about their implementation of NLP. This has enormous potential as a teaching tool - the biggest hurdle to getting more out of a package like this on first use is not knowing how to interact with it. However, I had had similar expectations of Alpha, and was greatly disappointed. though full of witty easter eggs and stocked with a rich variety of datasets, exploratory queries proved sadly frustrating.
Here's what I want to see in version 9 (laugh now, realize I'm right later): Kinect interaction. Perhaps unwittingly, Microsoft have just launched the next great peripheral and it seems intuitively popular with the public in a way I haven't seen for years and years. Now, imagine you've generated or imported a mathematically-specified 3d object in M., and imagine it inside a bounding box with handles on the vertices and local minima/maxima. Multi-point, multi-d interactivity would be both absorbing for students and potentially extremely productive for professionals, without requiring significant retooling of the core.
Intentional or not, it's having a good launch - word is that it's flying off shelves, and seems to have instant mass appeal. I was at an information management technology conference a week ago, and guess which two booths were the most crowded? The ones that were trading 3 minutes of sales pitching for a go at Dance Dance Revolution or whatever the Kinect version is called. Incidentally, the other thing being used to bribe jaded conference-goers was the prospect of winning an iPad every hour - there must have been 30 exhibitors using that one.
http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/ref/ControllerManip...
About a year ago, I was working on a machine learning problem. I had a lot of training data I wanted to manually classify, so I put together a Mathematica interface for the data that would let me browse the training set and assign classifications from a USB gamepad. It was pretty straightforward... only took an hour or two to implement, and it sure beat classifying with mouse clicks!