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Comment by brobdingnagians | Hacker News Reader

You seem to have an axe to grind. They have made a very nice ecosystem over the course of 30 years, they are opening it up more. They are proud of "how uniform, elegant and stable a design we’ve been able to maintain across the whole language." It is difficult to get that in an open source project and ecosystem. This has some marvelous qualities that come from its closed source nature. It is special because of that. Having both open source and closed source projects in the world complement each other. Use the best tool for the job. Sometimes the best tool is to be closed source, sometimes open source. There are pros _and_ cons to _both_. I think it is great and applaud them for making such a nice tool, and now making it more widely available. Maybe it wouldn't be so great if it started out open source, or would be similar to open source things and not be distinct enough, so I'm grateful for what it is and what it is not.

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No axe to grind. I’d like to think I’m a representative sample of my fellow software engineers. I don’t even want to make statements about open vs closed source generally. But as it pertains to developer tools (compilers, interpreters, debuggers, runtimes, standard libraries), open source has been hugely successful, hugely popular, and both individuals and corporations depend on that fact. You’re right, and I think I fairly painted a picture of Wolfram’s thesis about Mathematica being a commercial closed source product: He has the best general-purpose CAS on the market right now. That’s real value! But it’s not persuasive enough to spend my (or my employer’s) time, energy, and other resources into making it the source language of my (or my employer’s) product, IP, services, open source libraries, etc. Under discussion is a tool to write and run code in Wolfram Language, with a premise that providing the tool free of charge for use in a limited set of legal circumstances is useful. I argue that the legal framework around the usage of the tool is more consequential to its adoption and use than the cost.

With that said, I don’t speak for everyone! If folks find this tool useful, love writing Wolfram code, have no expectations about the portability or maintainability of the code, trust Wolfram and the contract to which they’re agreeing, then by all means! More value for people is better!

I agree on that point. It definitely wouldn't fit for a lot of people, and licensing is extremely important. Point taken on developer tools as well. But some diversity doesn't hurt there. :)

"I’m a representative sample of my fellow software engineers"

I'm a bit puzzled about how strongly you seem to be feeling about this topic. Given your comments, you seem to be quite far from the target audience of Mathematica. It's not for software engineers. Most productive work done with Mathematica is not "building software" ...

But given all this hostility, have you downloaded it, and have you tried it? Or is all this just philosophical (i.e. the least interesting) criticism? There seems to be no experience backing your comments.

I do computer mathematics. I’m the author of a computational group theory package [2], and my day job is in quantum mechanics and quantum computation, but in that I’m building packages in a software engineering capacity. The algebra gets pretty gnarly. Check out a recent paper, which includes both a math [0] and SW [1] component. Perhaps because of this I’m unusually representative of the intersection between math and software.

I hope folks aren’t finding my comments hostile. I have used the Mathematica product before in their GUI and at the command line, and some of my colleagues use it for various calculation tasks. I’ve opted to stick to open source alternatives like Sage, wxMaxima, GAP, and Axiom/Fricas.

The engine doesn’t give you a license to Mathematica, so I don’t presume the target audience is the collection of folks who want to do differential equations with plots. The article emphasizes lots of software things (languages, integrations, etc.), so actually I do believe they’re targeting software engineers.

You should note that I have not criticized their features, but rather restrictions on the use of the product in the first place . Maybe that would be interesting to read, but instead I have commented on the leading question in Wolfram’s article. I have not and will not download their Wolfram engine in its current state though for the reasons I’ve outlined. Do recall that using it means I’m bound to a legal contract, and that’s not one I’m willing to engage with.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.10541

[1] https://github.com/rigetti/quilc/blob/master/src/compilers/a...

[2] https://github.com/stylewarning/cl-permutation

No, your comments have been rather measured, and I applaud you for it.

cL-permutations looks nice!

As an old Lisp programmer, it makes me feel good seeing CL applications.

I broadly agree with your points in this conversation but I am downloading the Engine right now. I also did a ten day free trial of Mathematica recently. I have a little time to spare to kick the tires.

BTW, in the same way that Keras has functionality to download some standard data sets and cache them locally, I would like to see more CL projects do the same. Julia has a few such packages. Having easy to access data is a selling point for Wolfram Language.

I think people are confusing your certainty with hostility. I've read all of your follow up responses in this thread, and don't see any kind of hostility. What I am seeing is a lot of ad hominem hostility being directed at you as little prefaces to people's arguments.

Not sure how the parent comment is hostile. They aren't critiquing the system itself, they are critiquing its method of distribution.

As such, this comment:

>But given all this hostility, have you downloaded it, and have you tried it? Or is all this just philosophical (i.e. the least interesting) criticism? There seems to be no experience backing your comments.

does not seem to apply

I don’t think OP is axe-grinding, just responding to Wolfram’s naïve sentiment of “I don’t get how anyone could possibly see any downsides to this!”

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