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Comment by __ryan__ | Hacker News Reader

Compared to what? What about the docker image? It’s effectively a development environment for math, and it’s seemingly robust. It doesn’t seem particularly wasteful in its use of dependencies specifically has the goal of interfacing with other open source tools. Rolling their own X for everything rather than using the de-facto third party libraries seems like a fine, manageable choice to me.

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Compared to Mathematica, which has an installer, and a cloud version. Docker image does sound useful, for a more technical user.

Expecting a project like this to come out of the box with the polish of a decades old tool isn't quite fair is it?

But if it doesn't, then it's not really an alternative to Mathematica.

That's quite subjective.

To someone with no money to spend, Mathematica isnt really an alternative to Mathics.

Is a pen not an alternative to a pencil? Different features and tradeoffs; it depends on preference and context. If anything it’s less of an alternative if there’s no differences, otherwise it would be byte-for-byte Mathematica and you’d be unable to choose between the two.

Perhaps it isn't for some things or if you can't install it. But that's really dependent on use case and user, isn't it?

Well, I bought Mathematica decades ago, from the university book store. It came in a box and had an installer.

Then it’s an alternative for technical users.

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