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Comment by baq | Hacker News Reader

Imagine jupyter notebooks with a nice lispish language and the most complete standard library ever developed. Haven’t used it for almost 15 years, it was great back then, nowadays when I need something more than a simple calculator I go to wolframalpha - it’s basically Mathematica, but with one line of input instead of a notebook.

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It's noteworthy that Mathematica invented the notebook UI that Jupyter ended up popularizing.

It has some strengths, but since its syntax highlighting is coupled to the kernel state it didn't have an undo function for the longest time. Also as big vim fan it's disappointing to not being able to use your favorite editor.

Emacs has EIN which allows you to edit and run Jupyter Notebooks. Combining that with a vim keybindings mode like Evil, you can use vim bindings on notebooks.

Edit: The github page for EIN says that development has stopped. Despite this, I was able to edit a notebook with only minor inconveniences very recently.

An actively developed alternative is emacs-jupyter, which allows you to use an org file similarly to a notebook.

No. Incorrect. There was a precursor that had the idea Of notebook but didn’t call it that. By your logic Wolfram invented symbolic computation, Computational complexity and many other things. Let’s Not go down that route please.

Mathcad has the notebook metaphor (calculations embedded in live formatted documents) by 1986. Mathcad predates Mathematica by 1 year. [1]

[1] Mathcad 2.0 Ad from 1987, the oldest I have found in 10 min. https://books.google.es/books?id=sc4TnHAYBSUC&pg=PA42

Thanks for looking into it. Yes this is correct. Knowing what I hear about wolfram, even if there is a record in history wolfram claims He is the first.

I may have been incorrect because it's hard to know about everything and I have no issue to stand corrected, but please do not attack my logic by building strawmen. You could have simply stated the name of that predecessor, ideally with a link.

The basis my comment for this was this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22278637

Unfortunately the Atlantic article is now paywalled.

Archive from 20220805:

https://archive.is/4l509

Don’t trust the PR coming out of Wolfram. His wiki entry was paid for, his puppets on the net do the rest propogating disinformation And misinformation. He has connection to writers from New York Times and others.

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