Comment by MonkeyClub | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MonkeyClub | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> I love Wolfram stuff.

I'm with you 100% here, but I'm also 100% with sibling jiggawatts.

To me, Mathematica is a computation environment that conveys a Lisp Machine feeling of "the machine and I are working on this problem".

You know, that "assembling things live in the sky" Lisp feeling (Yegge's phrase, not mine).

The only other computation environment that is right there en par in flexibility and conveyance of the same trippy feeling is, of course, Emacs.

The company can still make money from academic and professional licensing and support contracts, and everyone else gets to have access to an awesome thinking tool as a matter of fact.

They've already gone that direction a bit with the Raspberry release, what's left now is just the final push.

So, if Stephen Wolfram ever reads this:

Open source Mathematica and it will have a chance at immortality.

Just like Lisp and just like Emacs, and the people will rejoice.

Disclaimer: I started with Mathematica 4.0 at age 14 (a pirate copy too, sorry!), turned on by that marvellous column in Quantum. But I was put off precisely due to the proprietary nature, and switched to C and Lisp. Consequently I became a CS guy rather than a Physics guy, because C and Lisp were accessible early on, while Mathematica wasn't (legitimately).

>You know, that "assembling things live in the sky" Lisp feeling (Yegge's phrase, not mine). > >The only other computation environment that is right there en par in flexibility and conveyance of the same trippy feeling is, of course, Emacs.

Agreed. That's the main thing that tends to get lost when people make comparisons between MATLAB and Mathematica. Mathematica is conceptually elegant and often just a joy to work with as an intellectual tool. Its core problem is just that it isn't more widely available. MATLAB on the other hand is just an inelegant, obvious implementation of a numerical environment. Its strength is just the variety of toolkits you can license, but once your domains get equivalent open source toolkits, there's no reason not to bail on MATLAB.

>I started with Mathematica 4.0 at age 14 (a pirate copy too, sorry!)

The nice thing these days is that the full version of Mathematica is available for free on the Raspberry Pi. Wolfram deserves some kudos for that.

> Wolfram deserves some kudos for that.

I feel like the other drug dealers in history might be offended at not getting at least some credit here for inventing this method.

I'm quite pro Free Software but I think that analogy is stretching it too much. In fact, I think it's so hyperbolic it ends up working against the point you're trying to make, which is one I agree with (e.g., I really like Mathematica, but I'm teaching my kid Sage for now).

If it's true as you seem be indicating even in your case, then I don't see how it's being hyperbolic. "True but sad" still includes "true".

I meant to say that offering Mathematica free at an early stage of the educational process for improved chance of lock-in later in life is a point I agree is bad. I'm not opposed to proprietary software, in fact I use some, but I do not like that sort of lock-in practice.

I stand by the fact that the comparison to drug dealers is not true. There's a very, very long path from legal but shady (to me) business practices to things like engaging in all out war with rival dealers, getting people hooked on stuff that in many cases renders them zombies, torturing and killing people that owe you money or that get in your way, forcing rural people to plant what you want or getting them killed or displaces, which are all part of the things drug dealers do. Not even the Microsoft from the 90s was comparable to that.

So, to try and restate my original reply in a hopefully clearer way: I agree with the point you're trying to make, but I think the analogy you chose may go against it for some readers.

> You know, that "assembling things live in the sky" Lisp feeling (Yegge's phrase, not mine). The only other computation environment that is right there en par in flexibility and conveyance of the same trippy feeling is, of course, Emacs.

Do you know Pharo? The experience you describe is also typical in the Smalltalk family. See https://pharo.org/

>You know, that "assembling things live in the sky" Lisp feeling (Yegge's phrase, not mine).

Got a source on that? It sounds intriguing.

> turned on by that marvellous column in Quantum

which column?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com