Arithmetic is Hard--To Get Right: Wolfram Research on Excel bug | Hacker News Reader

Arithmetic is Hard--To Get Right: Wolfram Research on Excel bug

blog.wolfram.com

20 pointshhm11 comments

Article summary:

Math is hard, buy Mathematica, buy Mathematica, here's a picture of Excel, buy Mathematica, buy Mathematica, math is hard unless you buy Mathematica, buy Mathematica, BUY MATHEMATICA, BUY MATHEMATICA, ... I SAID BUY MATHEMATICA OR MATH WILL BE HARD!!! BUY IT!!! BUY IT NOW!!!

Note that the salesmanship in the summary is a bit more subtle than the actual article.

This reminds me of a bug in Mathematica from back in the late '90: there was a whole class of sums that Mathematica said were negative, even though each term in the sum was strictly positive! "Carry problem", my ass.

He's convinced me. I'm going to use Mathematica for all my spreadsheets now.

Thats kind of like buying a Bugatti Veyron to go pick up groceries.

But if you can afford it, more power to you. Mathematica is like $2k IIRC.

It's also available for free on your favorite bittorrent tracker or eMule. I'd use a Bugatti Veyron to get my groceries if I could acquire one for free without causing any economic loss to anyone. Hell, I'd use a new one every single day.

But would you pay for it if you had the money?

For Mathematica, I would buy it if it was required in a specific professional context. For what I normally calculate, Google is fine and I use a TI-89 if I need to solve anything symbolic. Mathematica is significantly harder to use than either of those for me.

And instead of a Bugatti Veyron, I'd get two Tesla Roadsters and buy ten more for friends or as company cars for employees.

i bought mine when i was a student, and it cost me a hundred or two bucks. if i had the money -- yes, i would pay for the non-student version. i don't know of a more multiparadigmy language, and it's more or less the most powerful computational environment available in terms of what you can do

unfortunately the language isn't very readable -- not in the semantic sense, but just how it looks. the usage of square brackets for functions (myFun[arg]) is particularly ugly, and absolutely hideous when nested

I was poking fun : )

> Of course, this works just fine in Mathematica...

Works just fine in bc(1) too.

Yeah arithmetic is so hard most calculators have bugs in them... oh wait a second...

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