From a purely programming language theory, it's pretty unique.
I once tried to find a language that had all the same properties, and I failed. The Factor language is probably the closest. But they are still pretty different.
Now Mathematica notebooks (still remember, it is .nb) do not have the novelty factor. But they were the first to set a trend, which we now take for granted.
That said, I rarely use notebooks anymore. In the coding time, it is much easier to create scripts and ask to create a visualization in HTML.
SPSS is hilariously painful to use. Still it's only losing ground ever so slowly.
I was wondering what's stopping some employee from something like Mathematica from taking the source code and having an agent port it to open source. Or even reconstruction from the manual. Who owns an algorithm?
Will everything get copied eventually?
Laws against theft. Also the same reason employees don't release the code on pastebin or something.
> Who owns an algorithm?
The org or person who was granted the software patent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patent
> Will everything get copied eventually?
If we're lucky. More likely everything bitrots as technical capabilities are lost. Slowly at first, then quickly.
adius•2d ago
apetresc•2h ago
cs702•2h ago
muizelaar•2h ago
How close is it to being able to run rubi: https://rulebasedintegration.org/?
disentanglement•2h ago
cs702•2h ago
It's a worthwhile effort. If successful, Woxi can enable a large mass of scientists and engineers who don't have access to Mathematica to run legacy code written for it. Also, Woxi would give those scientists and engineers who regularly use Mathematica a non-proprietary, less restrictive alternative, which many of them would welcome.
How does Woxi compare to other "clean-room implementations"[a] of the same language?
--
[a] Please check with a lawyer to make sure you won't run into legal or copyright issues.
utopiah•1h ago
dist-epoch•1h ago
Better license? Allowed for commercial operations?
adius•43m ago
- Faster startup time because of no license check
- Can run multiple instances of Woxi at the same time
- Embeddable via WASM
- Configurable via compile time flags (which features should be included)
- …
foobarqux•57m ago
adius•46m ago
Here is e.g. all the values for the Plus[] function:
$ wolframscript -code 'WolframLanguageData["Plus", "Ranks"]' {All -> 6, StackExchange -> 8, TypicalNotebookInputs -> 5, TypicalProductionCode -> 6, WolframAlphaCodebase -> 6, WolframDemonstrations -> 4, WolframDocumentation -> 4}
egl2020•30m ago
adius•23m ago