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Comment by tluyben2 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah I liked it as well; the notebook execution especially. Makes me sad to see how primitive iPython/iHaskell now are compared to the Mathematica editor almost 20 years ago. I hoped it would be the about same experience or better, but it's far from. Especially the web version for iHaskell (I assume the iPython web version is the same?) is horrible, absolutely horrible. But the idea is great and it is possible to make it work well as Wolfram has shown.

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Well this is how it is now I'm afraid. There are "data scientists" using IPython convinced that they themselves and the tools they use are on the cutting edge. Like there are database people who think MongoDB is advanced. Or web guys using their favourite "framework" kidding themselves they're doing anything more complicated than Perl CGIs did in 1994.

It's like an Amiga owner being shown a "multimedia" PC in 1995 and thinking, I was doing all this 10 years ago.

Amiga example works; took me definitely over 10 years to stop saying that after I was forced to move to PCs. And then I had it with Unix (SparcStation 5s which never crashed and never had to be rebooted against our uni's 100s of PCs which were mandatory rebooted during the night otherwise they were unusable during the day, and still were actually), luckily everyone listened and we're all using that now. Well no, but at least you CAN now without being hopelessly crippled.

Thing is ; these notebook interfaces COULD be really brilliant, but they suck and I don't know why. Maybe just not enough people working on them?

How much do the people working on them get paid to work on them?

What many users of open source don't seem to understand is that actually, honest-to-goodness open source development is a major undertaking and imposition on a person's time. And quality software takes actual teams of actual people with experience and commitment and a basic peace-of-mind about paying their mortgage and putting food on the table.

No, it's more subtle than that. If you have paying customers and hence money, you can pay for experts in domain X to sit down with your programmers and finesse the product. If you don't, then what you have is a wishlist of features but no real, deep understanding of what users use them for. That's why the GIMP is the GIMP, every feature under the sun, in a horrible mishmash interface and for more of its life unusable for professional work because the one feature it really needed, 16-bit colour, wasn't prioritized because none of the devs realized they needed to.

You are right and I do understand that actually. So instead of whining I'll go help improve it. Not the web version for now though; the everything web thing is not working for me as at least my i7/16gb/ssd system is far too slow for productive work in that kind of context.

For the same reason that GIMP is no Photoshop.

I wish Mathematica had vi editing mode. As it is now editing the command line is stupid slow for someone who has lived in vim for 20 years now.

This is why I love IPython on the command line. Language is nicer too and editing is a breeze. Of course Python and available libraries are not much of a symbolic computing environment, but for the kinds of problems I deal with its faster to get things done than in Mathematica.

As the author of IHaskell, I'd love to know what you find lacking! (I agree that there's still a lot of room for improvement) The front-end is entirely IPython, so there's probably not much I can do other than contribute to ipython, but would love to hear concrete suggestions (feel free to use github issues).

Sorry if I came on a bit strong ; it was serious disappointment on my side as Haskell hacker and user of Mathematica for my Master almost 20 years ago. Of course yourr work is valued by me and many others and I will try to to work on the iPython interface myself as well as writing the above I thought; why not.

I would definitely say that the smoothness of the Mathematica interface, the way it works and interacts currently would be a great thing for programming languages like Haskell. It's just clumsy the way it is now and this is not something you can help but it needs fixing. Let's discuss further somewhere!

Hey there! Sorry I missed this comment earlier, but if you see this, please feel free to ping me via email (my email is in my profile!)

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