Hacker News Reader

Comment by aleph_minus_one | Hacker News Reader

> And I'm being generous when I say "pretty": I have never encountered it in any job or even in academia. People know of it. They just don't use it for work.

To my knowledge, at least in academia, Wolfram (Mathematica) seems to be used quite a bit by physicists. Also in some areas of mathematics it is used (but many mathematicians seems to prefer Maple). Concerning mathematical research, I want to mention that by now also some open-source (and often more specialized) CASs seem to have become more widespread, such as SageMath, SymPy, Macaulay2, GP/PARI or GAP.

View on HN

You're right -- the theoretical particle physicists at my faculty were using Mathematica very heavily when I was still in academia and maintained a dedicated compute cluster for it.

They really did not appreciate the debugging experience, but maybe that's improved in 15 years. :)

I've been at a few universities and labs as a postdoc, and a Mathematica license always came either as part of the University or the department. It might not be relevant in some disciplines, but generally I assume it must be used a lot to warrant such broad licensing (it is a tool I use daily as a theoretical physicist).

In Maple sin(x) is "sin(x)", in Mathematica it's "Sin[x]", ewww

In my opinion, Wolfram/Mathematica is more consistent internally, while Maple is more consistent with the usual mathematical notation.

> while Maple is more consistent with the usual mathematical notation

I can't tell if you're saying that as if it's a good thing, or a bad thing.

It's not about good nor bad, but about the different trade-offs that these two CASs made. What is more important for you is something that you can only answer for yourself.

I actually loved this idea so much that every language I make, I try to do the same. The point of it is that typing ( requires shift, while [ does not. And you have no idea when you have tunnel syndrome, how much it hurts each time you write a (. While it’s ugly, the hand thanks you for it.

> The point of it is that typing ( requires shift, while [ does not.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xkeyboard-config/xkeyboard-co...

Now, I really could've used something like this on macOS…

Karabiner to the rescue https://genesy.github.io/karabiner-complex-rules-generator/#...

As everybody knows ...

I use(d) arch btw

Ironically, on ISO keyboards, [] need an ALT so even more pain

The Maple syntax may superficially seem easier but actually leads to more problems in practice. The point of the [ ] is that argument of a function is logically distinct from algebraically grouping terms in an equation. Also, Mathematica is a camel case language since underscore is for pattern recognition, hence the capitalization of function names. Personally, I’ve found every little Mathematica design feature to be incredibly well thought out, logical, and consistently implemented over the whole of the language.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com