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Comment by newaccount74 | Hacker News Reader

Mathematica had a really nice way of entering equations, once you learned the shortcuts. It's so much nicer to see fractions, matrices and integrals in proper notation, rather than an endless sea of parenthesis.

Eg. when you enter a rotation matrix, it's obvious when you make a mistake when you use the graphical editor in Mathematica. It takes a lot more effort to check if ((1,0,0),(0, sin(2pit),cos(2pit)),(0, cos(2pit),-sin(2pit))) is correct.

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This, so much this, writting nested equations are hell in python and other mathematica alternatives but they are so easy in mathematica.

What is a nested equation?

Nesting is the concept of having a thing under another thing. 1+2 will be referred to as a mathematical equation and 1+((((a-b)/3+2/87)-6)23) will be referred to as a nested equation. Of cause this is rather lose semantics since both are expressions or statements and not equations, but that’s how the language is typically used.

This is what that looks like in wolfram alpha: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=1%2B%28%28%28%28a-b%29%... It looks the same in Mathematica while your typing it in, which makes I extremely easy to work with, because even very complex equations look exactly like usual in Mathematica instead of ending up looking like lisp implementation of the Fibonacci sequence.

> looking like lisp implementation of the Fibonacci sequence.

I wonder if Lisp can benefit from a similar 2d visualization sugar.

Yeah, the nesting Viz shouldn't be too hard. Just nested divs in HTML really.

And super/sub scripts are in HTML as well.

Unicode is doing all the symbols these days

Param placement like n=0 under a summation, etc are a little more idiosyncratic

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