Launching Version 14.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica | Hacker News Reader

Launching Version 14.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

writings.stephenwolfram.com

37 pointsnsoonhui17 comments

> The Wolfram Language runtime is a dynamic library that you link into your program, and then call using a C-based API.

> And, by the way, you can distribute the Wolfram runtime as an integrated part of an application, with its users not needing their own licenses to run it.

This is huge! Does the exporter need a license or is that covered by the free Wolfram Engine too?

„ adding the Wolfram Language will often increase the disk requirements of your application only by a remarkably small amount—like just a few hundred megabytes or even less.“

only a few hundred megabytes…

mathematica has gotta be the language/framework/whatever with the highest (dev hours)/(nicheness) ratio out there.

i have no clue who's paying for this (other than a few academics) such that they have enough money to pay for enough devs to continue to polish/improve. i'm vaguely aware some quantfi type people use it but it's gotta be such a small group that either they're paying through the nose for those licenses or there's some other customer segment i'm not aware of.

Universities pay per student.

I'm a little confused by who exactly some of these features are targeted to. Take the "computable history" bits, for example. None of it even begins to address making computable data useful for academic historians that might have access to Mathematica licenses. It might be useful for fun factoids at trivia nights, but queries against the data sets are severely restricted in the cheap ways to access the language, so that can't be it either.

Who's this for?

I don’t think that’s how Mathematica is developed. The vision seems to mostly be trying to model and encode the world regardless of how useful it appears to be. Unfortunately the modelling approach that is employed probably isn’t that useful to people actually interested in the data.

Yeah their built-in nuclear data, for instance, has never had sufficient citation info to use it for actual research, and it's unclear who would play with such information without having any possible interest in publishing.

Mathematica seems to be a grab bag of whatever excites Wolfram recently. It was heavy on cellular automata a few years ago and now it has llm stuff. It is a nice environment for playing with computation and doing back of the envelope work, but in the end i always write python programs instead because it's just easier to work with real data that way and the mathematica licensing is a pain.

Yeah it's pretty sad because I can imagine if this database was made public it could be built upon and parsed for many languages. Presumably they paid multiple people to do all this work but it's so expensive for a casual user

Wolfram on the cloud for free is good, especially for derivatives and simplification I use it a lot

They tried with it free on raspberry pis but who's going to boot a pi to do academic work

Did anyone else notice that with 14.1 the application (on Mac at least) has renamed from "Mathematica" to "Wolfram"?[1]

This is a bit annoying for me because I launch things using spotlight search so have to relearn my muscle memory[2] but also it doesn't replace the 14.0 binary which caused me to do the install and then redo it because I was launching "mathematica" which was still telling me 14.0 so I didn't think the upgrade had worked and ran it again before realising what was up.

[1] I find it kind of weird that he keeps naming things after himself but I suppose it's at least a consistent pattern.

[2] Actually I just made a symlink

It was always Wolfram language, Wolfram Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha. Now they're unifying the three products, makes sense to choose the common word that's also the name of the company, which is the name of the author and founder - also very standard, a bit less so in the IT world, but look anywhere else: Ford, Daimler Benz, Lockheed Martin, Sikorsky, Northrop Grumann, ...

Having the name of the product be the name of the company is not standard at all. Ford don't call have a car called the "Ford Ford". In fact none of those companies have the brand name of their products be the name of the company.

Secondly wolfram wasn't always the name of the language either. That name was adopted in 2013. That's why if you use a lot of products that do syntax highlighting (eg code blocks in mathjaxx) you get the right highlighting by going ```mathematica not ```wolfram.

It's Wolfram language, not Wolfram Wolfram...

I was referring to the product formerly known as mathematica, but whatever.

I am waiting for them to finally abandon this difficult and bizarre language and just make a library for Ruby.

I really don't think Ruby is a good match... Maybe something Lispy or Prology, but no idea how to match the symbolic solver runtime with the Ruby language (without tons of boilerplate).

Python makes way more sense to me than ruby

The only missing feature is being open source.

While it remains proprietary, it’s a no-go for the majority of potential users.

It’s the only propriety programming language that I use. All of the others were made open or have long since gone the way of the Dodo.

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