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Comment by andsoitis | Hacker News Reader

> It’s only recently that I’ve begun to properly internalize just how broad the implications of having a computational language really are—even though, ironically, I’ve spent much of my life engaged precisely in the consuming task of building the world’s only large-scale computational language.

Exemplar of humility.

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Wolfram should get a dedicated title tag (Wolfram) and hn rules should be amended with ‘this dude is a bit full of himself, everybody knows that, no need to bring it up’

Saying that as someone who’s consistently surprised by just how big his ego seems to be, getting bigger each year, didn’t think it’s possible.

The admin has already decreed exactly that. People just love to whine.

Or, for that matter, just come together in community and crack jokes we can all agree on, at the expense of someone we all know. Call it A New Kind of Socializing.

When you've done as much as him any kind of ego that you may possess becomes justified.

This could be covered if there was a principle to respect the man in the arena. That should also discourage you-reinvented-the-wheel pile-ons.

The Ratatouille critic put this well - "We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgement. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read."

It sounds like once you get the zen of Mathematica, it’s a truly exceptional tool to work with.

It’s a shame that the only person it seems has get the zen of Mathematica is Stephen Wolfram himself.

I mean, it really is good software. It's by far the best CAS around and the "standard library" is extremely impressive.

But like all software it involves tradeoffs. Fanatics of any technology or idea are never the easiest people to reason with.

Agreed, but what are the tradeoffs for Mathematica?

Mathematica has the best CAD capabilities for many/most tasks, but the language is rather horrible. E.g. code can not be commented, the program state is difficult to manage or even reset, it's very tied to the Mathematica "notebook". And it's quite idiosyncratic.

I sometimes have to use it where Sympy fails, and every time it's almost constant WTF.

And it's very proprietary and very expensive.

Note it's free on the raspberry pi!

https://www.wolfram.com/raspberry-pi/

If you have one collecting dust in a drawer, I'd heartily recommend checking it out.

check the license, though.

https://www.wolfram.com/legal/agreements/wolfram-mathematica...

> code can not be commented

Mathematica has a C-like syntax for comments

    (* this is a comment *)

but it doesn't have C++ style comments

    // This is a C++ comment

Actually those are Pascal-like comments. Pascal uses (* ... *) for arbitrary comments as well as { ... } for single line comments.

I stand corrected. For some reason I hadn't figured this out earlier even though I tried to find it.

> And it's very proprietary and very expensive

get free kernel and wljs notebook

Comes as a big monolithical block that's much harder to work with if you have to develop bigger systems, language tooling is lacking even compared to something like Python that's already mediocre, in many aspects (data analysis/data engineering, machine learning, etc.) isn't as good as other options like Python or R.

It's also not great as a general purpose language. It was never meant as such of course, but working in a real language where I can take stuff off a notebook and have it become a script has its advantages.

Finally, I'm willing to use open-source software that's slightly worse if the difference isn't huge, and for many use cases the difference isn't huge. For some it is, and that's where Mathematica is great.

It is a bit Zen, but if you don't use it for a few months you forget everything because the syntax is so different.

In his case the zen of mathematica is that people will write a slick function for whatever he is interested in at the moment.

Everyone else needs to deal with stuff like '#1 + #2 & @@@ # &/ @'.

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