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Comment by monkeybutton | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone here used Wolfram Cloud? Itchy junk, have you? What was your experience?

I have some experience from a few years ago with the self hosted version but I haven't had anyone to compare notes with since then. Ultimately it was more cost-effective for us to migrate to Python and jupyter lab.

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I started using it yesterday since I realized it was free. I am kind of using it like a scripting language for a smart search engine. I don't know if that's the right mentality but it seems to have some features i kind of want from a search engine to quickly do research with. Find some data, show me a graph of it. Use the last search result to do some other stuff kind of stuff. That is partially why I posted it to HN, hoping to see what other people are using it for.

The community forum thingy that's built in seems to have a lot of people using it for very mathy things like visualizing particular solutions to say PDE or somesuch.

I briefly tried using it a couple of weeks ago, when there was a post here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29406322) about it. I took a small notebook I had made in Colab:

https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1FqJomu3MAWLz_Dc2y15...

and tried converting it to Wolfram Cloud:

https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/shreevatsapublic/Published/...

Pros: The Wolfram / Mathematica language, once you learn it, is likely to be consistent and powerful. (Browse some questions on https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/)

Cons: Mostly around familiarity and ubiquity, versus a closed ecosystem. For example, it took me a long time to figure out how to put everything into the Wolfram language (imperative things are awkward to do; had to figure out how `Do` and `Module` work), there are fewer resources for learning it, etc. Can't use standard Markdown, nor TeX syntax for math[1] AFAIK. There may be an alternative way to typeset mathematics; I never got around to it. The UI is unfamiliar to me (harder to see where the cells are, deleting a cell was nontrivial to figure out).

Maybe with time it will become easier, but overall, I expect to continue to use Jupyter / Colab notebooks when they work well enough, and try Wolfram Cloud again when I want something really nontrivial that sympy / Sage / etc can't do cleanly… which is probably unlikely, as the Python ecosystem continues to close the gap.

([1]: Aside: Did you know that MathML came into existence, with impetus from Wolfram, to make it harder to use TeX/LaTeX syntax for math on the web? See https://www.mathmlcentral.com/history.html#:~:text=To%20head... )

(disclaimer, I work at Wolfram Research)

I'd love more tools for using TeX and markdown. There are a few but they're not really given as a first choice anywhere.

About MathML... I mean I'm also not a fan. I'm not sure anyone really is. I've been cursed to work with it in some legacy pages. I love using mathjax. I'm not familiar at all with the two people who from the company who worked on it or that project. But I think it's going a bit far to think that MathML was nefarious corporate plot to manipulate the W3C. (0) MathML doesn't interoperate with WolframLanguage in any particularly great or exclusive way. (1) MathML makes more sense for the time period it was introduced than it does now. Mathjax is technology I don't think people foresaw at the time (Reparsing the DOM and injecting some kind of formatted math notation?!) People really thought math notation would need to be expressed in an XML like format. The other option at the time afaik was static images you'd generate from LaTeX and insert into your document. (2) TeX is a language for typesetting math in a paper and people thought we'd need something that went deeper, representing something closer to the intended semantics of the notation. This was probably a mistake.

Afaik MathML didn't make it harder for people to use TeX on the web.

Oh yes, definitely, I didn't mean that MathML was a nefarious corporate plot. Just that there's a tension between pragmatists and idealists: in this case those who just want to put math on the web for the common case in any way at all (images, MathJax, whatever works), and those who think/thought that semantics should be encoded, just as you said. (That's what the page I linked says too: "There was a danger during the 1990s that a standard would emerge for mathematical representation on the web that would be based on a TeX[…]-like typesetting language. This would have been disastrous […] To head off this possibility, Wolfram Research and Neil Soiffer decided to do everything they could to […]" etc.)

This tension has played out a few times in practice, e.g. when Wikipedia removed the (added in 2012) MathJax option and went back to images-only (2016? https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T99369) based to a large extent on arguments from people who are (still) MathML proponents (which I understand Wolfram may not be any more) — at least some of them are "semantic" advocates who believe in "structured" math input rather than "presentation" markup. So there's some conflict there.

(Anyway, this is all historical and unrelated to Wolfram Cloud.)

Wolfram Cloud keeps getting better. It's streets ahead of where it was a year or two ago.

Best feature is the ability to share files with notebooks created in the desktop version.

My workflow is: create and refine using the desktop version or Mathematica or Wolfram Desktop. Then access the notebook from anywhere, anytime, even on mobile devices.

Some downsides: you can mess-up a notebook on mobile there's effectively no "undo" capability to fix botched steps.

Presently I'd say, if you are using the cloud version only, best to create and iterate on a desktop computer browser first. Creating and iterating on a tablet or phone browser isn't going to be a good experience. That said, it's getting there.

I use it from time to time for work. It lacks some of Mathematica’s typographic flair (can’t ctrl-^ to get a superscript box or / to get a fraction) but IIRC has better undo support on desktop and satisfactory performance as long as your output expressions don’t get too big. The web layout engine chokes pretty badly for medium-to-large expressions, although there is an automatic transition to pre-rendered images at a certain level of complexity.

I use it when I want an industrial-grade CAS for some nasty integral or when I want to do something LISPy.

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