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Comment by nswanberg | Hacker News Reader

It's a poor substitute, but consider contributing to Mathics, an open-source Mathematica implementation written in Python. I believe it is integrated with Sage. https://github.com/poeschko/Mathics (I imagine it would also run on the Raspberry Pi).

There is likely a lot left to be done in the core language, but encourage folks to start with v1 of the language: http://reference.wolfram.com/legacy/v1/

Once the core of the language is working, implementing things like simplification and integration become much easier: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Arefer...

It seems unlikely that such a movement would grow to be the size of Mathematica or the Wolfram language, but then again Linux and Wikipedia also seemed unlikely at the time.

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Mathics core developer here

We used to integrate with Sage, but no longer. The main reason is that it wasn't really used for anything, but made installing Mathics much more complicated

I've never known where to focus my efforts for the free stuff.

Should I work on Mathics, Sympy, Maxima, or Axiom? Or is Sage itself growing its own routines?

What are your goals and strengths? I am not familiar with the state of most of those projects, but fixing bugs and completing todo items is welcome anywhere, I imagine, and if your goal is to improve free software then any of those seem a good choice. That's not a very exciting answer, though.

I suggested Mathics because you appear to be interested in what Mathematica can do but resent that it closed source. Since it does not appear that it will be open sourced soon (Taliesin discussed this elsewhere and I got a similar answer from Stephen in an AMA http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/tmutz/stephen_wolfram_...), and because duplicating even a portion of a system with a 25-year head start would require a massive amount of effort, it seems the best choice would be to work on a program that would best organize the efforts of the other programs. To agree with that statement one probably has to agree that the language is the best one to build a system around.

I'm not actually interested in Mathematica itself. I just know it can do lots of things that the free CASes can't.

I currently work on Octave because there's so much Matlab code out there that needs to be liberated. Is it the same case with Mathematica code? Are people able to easily take their code from Mathematica and run it in Mathics?

That's the idea! In practise, we're still getting there and you may have to work around functions not yet implemented in Mathics.

I'd really like to see Mathics become the Octave of Mathematica.

Maxima is pretty simple and straight forward (and is kind of a free version of TI Interactive), but if it has to also look pretty, then OpenAxiom is way better as it easily exports to TeX or MathML:

)set output tex on

)set output mathml on

Practically all of the symbolic computation done by Mathics uses Sympy. It depends what your interests are. If you're interested in Symbolic computation I'd suggest Sympy. It's a really nice pure python package and it's easy to get started.

If you're familiar with / interested in Mathematica, I'd suggest helping Mathics out. The Mathematica language is massive, and there's heaps of low hanging fruit left in Mathics.

(Mathics core developer here btw)

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