The reality is that by now we should already be at a level where common programming would be like Wolfram everywhere.
Maybe agents and LLM driven code generation is how we eventually get into the next abstraction level, sadly won't be without casualties with smaller team sizes, when so much can be automated away.
Nowadays I'd probably just ask Claude to figure it out for me, but pre LLMs, WL was the highest value tool for thought in my toolbox.
(Edit: and they actually offer perpetual licenses!)
If this was open sourced, it had the potential to severely change the software/IT industry. As an expensive proprietary software however, it is deemed to stay a niche product mainly for academia.
Mathematica seems a little pricey but maybe it would motivate me to learn more math.
I would love to read what non-mathematicians use MatLab, Mathematica, and Maple for.
I played around with RemoteKernel some time ago (https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2016/08/10/0830) but this is “better”, although I wish they’d make it hostable in your own cloud provider like materials simulation software and other things we see running in HPC clusters. (I also ran Mathematica in a 512GB/128core VM once for kicks, but it’s just not cost-effective).
I do notice that they have an "Application Server" for Kubernetes, which is pretty curious: https://github.com/WolframResearch/WAS-Kubernetes (though not updated in over a year)
I started working on an implementation in Rust called Woxi (https://github.com/ad-si/Woxi) and I hope to find some contributors, as it is such a gargantuan task!
fsh•51m ago
pjmlp•47m ago
One would expect 37 years would be enough to create such alternative.
Jupiter notebooks aren't the same.
pfortuny•40m ago
xvilka•39m ago
fsh•18m ago
The notebooks are also difficult to version control (unreadable diffs for minor changes), and unit testing is clearly just an afterthought. Also the GUI performance is bad. Put more than a hand full of plots on a page, and everything slows to a crawl. What keeps me coming back is the comprehensive function library, and the formula inputs. I find it quite difficult to spot mistakes in mathematical expressions written in Python syntax.
auggierose•32m ago
hebejebelus•12m ago