Call outs to R code http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/new-in-9/built-in-integra...
Social network analysis http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/new-in-9/social-network-a...
Computation bar http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/new-in-9/next-computation...
Sigh. I dream of Mathematica being open source.
I dream of a world where people don't compulsively fantasize that for any given piece of software, it should be supplanted by some other piece of software whose main differentiating feature is that it's a FOSS clone.
Mathematica being open source would mean that I could look at the source though and see what the hell is going on inside. I'd love to see how they are doing call outs to R and trace through all the interactions between the kernel, the user interface, and W|A. If it were open source, I could see the implementations of all the Mathematical algorithms and look at all the neat optimizations and new results they have found during their work. I care about the "math in Mathematica and am interested in seeing how it all works.
That's what Google's Brin was working on when he interned there.
I share the dream of an open source Mathematica. It's so rich, elegant and powerful, using it would be a no-brainer. But in its present state? Nope. I've been bitten too many times by the proprietary nature of Matlab, in which I have invested a lot of work, to repeat the mistake. More specifically and from the top of my mind, I found that proprietary means:
- I cannot run my code on my personal PC
- some people I'm collaborating with cannot use my work
- when I move to a different job, there is a good chance I cannot reuse my code
- even when my new workstation (or my colleague's PC) does have the software installed, there is a good chance the version is incompatible with my code or the license doesn't include some toolbox I'm using
- some work I want to make freely available is of no use to someone who cannot afford the software
DownValues[GraphPlot]
Only a smallish subset of the language is written in C (for speed).
Edit: It's also kinda fun to use
Names["*`*"]
Names["Internal`*"]
Names["Developer`*"]
The amount of restraint you've just shown in describing NKS is superhuman.
Each time I've gotten to the point where I can do basic derivatives/integrals/polynomials/etc and realized the real power is in the huge library (and brain trust behind that library) available to you.
It really is quite enlightening to come back to other languages. It feels like you're going back to tin can and string communications.
I am incredibly excited about the improvements for operations research markov chains and queueing, as well as timeseries. These will simplify my code hugely, better yet speed up work.
Take a look at Maxima then. It is a good system too but not even close in quality, features, etc.I blame its open source nature for this.
Why is it's open source nature to blame here? Can you elaborate?
Is it the product vs. project argument?
In my not so humble opinion and only in my opinion open sourcing of Maxima (or Macsyma) put it in the wrong hands. Not to blame the actual developers of Maxima. Maxima is a very good project by itself just not as good as its commercial competitors.
And anyway, having a(nother) open-source symbolic mathematical program is better than not having it, even if it is substandard compared to the commercial offerings.
[1] http://www.wolfram.com/products/applications/excel_link/feat...
As a heavy user of both, my experience is that Mathematica is more difficult initially when writing your code, but is ultimately easier than Excel because the thing you would be doing in Mathematica would be very hard to do in Excel (it is both a technical as well as maintenance nightmare).