Stephen Wolfram Version 12 Launches Today (and It’s a Big Jump for Wolfram | Hacker News Reader

Stephen Wolfram Version 12 Launches Today (and It’s a Big Jump for Wolfram

blog.wolfram.com

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Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19674966.

Maybe change the title to "Wolfram Language Version 12 Launches"?

This is not the 12th iteration of Stephen Wolfram, the human ;)

And let’s close that parentheses. It’s breaking my syntax highlighting

Perhaps he is! Just like in Seveneves.

I clicked on this thinking it was genuine satire about his ego, actually.

I honestly thought he was announcing version 12 of his life management system.

I figured this was some waggish editorializing on the part of the submitter. Regarding the content, the propagation of uncertainties is pretty sweet, I'd like to see that everywhere. So many questions though, like how it interacts with piecewise models, or functions that map from a continuous to a categorical space. Presumably they have a clever answer. (Possibly I haven't read far enough.)

One thing that I find really compelling about Mathematica is that it's quintessential Cathedral software -- mostly developed under one roof, with an almost proverbially dominant centralizing vision. Compared to the Bazaar I'm accustomed to (CTAN, CPAN, PyPI, crates.io, et cetera) all I could find for Mathematica is this: http://packagedata.net/. 212 packages. You don't need to go looking for gargoyles, grotesques or stained glass, Mathematica has them all, and relics besides.

Based on the marketing and the visuals it seems like this really powerful and cool thing, but somehow I don't know anyone using it, nor do I see it "in the wild", e.g. blog posts playing with it, doing data science with it etc.

Much more so with scientific Python, Jupyter notebooks etc. I guess being proprietary is quite a big limitation for its adoption.

...never mind the fact that it costs several hundreds of dollars per year, even for personal use, while pretty much every computer ships with Python.

Anybody on HN using Wolfram/Mathematica at work? It seems like a massive tower of math software (possibly larger than MATLAB even), but I've been a bit daunted to ever get into it. I have no idea if it's usable for anything outside of academic research.

I've seen people use it in industrial cryptography and finance. It's the kind of app they open and fullscreen at the start of their day, and they don't switch to any app until they finish.

My phd adviser used it to train a neural network

The Around[] support for uncertainty is... mind-blowing. I've used Mathematica on and off over the years, and it never ceased to amaze me how _meaningful_ you could make your formulas, but this is pretty neat.

Haskell has a few libraries that do this[1]. Not trying to one-up the article or anything, just thought you might be interested to see that there are other places where this is available, and that it's not even something that needs full language support in some cases, just a library. Also similar - you can pretty transparently model nondeterminism[2] and probability[3] on a "promise"-like interface with just a library. Of course, whether or not there's good documentation is another story.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19598906/is-there-a-valu... [2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20638893/how-can-non-det... [3] http://wiki.haskell.org/Probabilistic_Functional_Programming

Is there a proper summary somewhere? The "summary" from wolfram is 61k words. I get that there's a lot in the update. Isn't summarizing a mass of complex information well suited to some kind of mechanical processing?

There are bullet points summarized by category here: http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/new-in-12/

and a comprehensive list of new features here: https://reference.wolfram.com/language/guide/SummaryOfNewFea...

From the changelog:

* Fixed bug where program names everything after itself

true u need itself plus a nonce for the cellular automaton to work

Maybe the code is based on a mind-snapshot from Stephen?

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