Comment by taliesinb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by taliesinb | Hacker News Reader

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> In fact, it can be argued that when the salaries of mid-level employees are low compared to industry norms

Read my post again: revenue / employee, not salary / revenue.

> One can read all sorts of user-level script code, but no source code at all.

What? Probably half of the Wolfram Language is written in the Wolfram Language. How is top-level code not source code?

> it explains why Mathematica cannot be used in serious mathematical work, work meant for technical and scientific publication and peer review.

You keep saying that... I think the truth is more subtle. A tool like Mathematica might play a crucial role in some result, but the proof or result itself doesn't a priori need to rest on any black box software at all to be reproducible.

A nice family of examples would be the class of NP problems, for which the discovery might have been difficult, and achieved via proprietary tools, but the verification is possible via open-source tools or with direct human insight.

And that's not even considering physics, biochemistry, engineering, and astronomy, where many of the tools you use will always be expensive and built by industry, and have no impact on peer review. Especially if they are a means to visualizing data to generate hypotheses, or processing or wrangling data into a tractable form.

> What? Probably half of the Wolfram Language is written in the Wolfram Language. How is top-level code not source code?

I can write BASIC code all day long without having access to the engine, the interpreter. But if I publish my result, there will be problems.

Also, if the language under discussion were so open, people would write third-party imitations -- not imitations of the results, but of the methods as well. But they can't. They can't because the source is secret.

> And that's not even considering physics, biochemistry, engineering, and astronomy, ...

The only way a result from a proprietary source would not be an issue is if the result isn't original. A routine statistical result, one that anyone can duplicate, isn't likely to be an issue. But an original result, one in which the mathematics itself is key to the result, would require full disclosure.

> ... where many of the tools you use will always be expensive and built by industry, and have no impact on peer review.

Not really. Any significant result must be completely transparent. To understand the reasons, review the history of the Mars Climate Orbiter:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter

Even though the specifications were perfectly clear, even though everything was out in the open, two teams used different unit systems, and a critical mid-flight burn went wrong. Imagine how much worse such things would be if any part of important technical processing was concealed from close inspection.

I advance the possibility that your thinking about programming languages has become, to paraphrase The Dude, way too uptight.

Is a telescope a proprietary source? Is a commercially manufactured CCD a proprietary source? Maybe they got the response curve wrong! Okay, test it before you announce your galactic dust measurement paper! I take that attitude towards "experimental mathematics" that involve computers in some deep way.

And no need to patronize with Wikipedia links, I know the story about the Mars Climate Orbiter. And I don't think it even demonstrates your point. As I understand it, vxWorks, which many of the NASA missions use, is closed source. You have to pay to see the source. And I'm sure that Wolfram Research would or could do the same thing for e.g. intelligence agencies (and hopefully will do for everyone in the future, fingers crossed).

Let me do some patronizing of my own: are you sure your understanding of what the language does is up to date? You seem to talk of it as if it were a predominantly a CAS: http://reference.wolfram.com/language/index.html

> And no need to patronize with Wikipedia links ...

Translation: "Don't document your claims like a scientist. What kind of conversation do you think this is?"

> As I understand it, vxWorks ...

Not relevant to the discussion except as another example of the dangers of closed-source systems.

Is Wolfram suddenly making public statements about its earnings?

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