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Comment by lenticular | Hacker News Reader

Mathematica is literally the worst PL I've ever used, especially since you effectively have to use their built-in editor that doesn't even have multiple undo. Of course, it is the least-worst symbolic system out there currently. But, it's not like lisp wouldn't have developed similar capabilities if Mathematica didn't come around.

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It's had multiple undo in notebooks (quite more than "an editor") for a while, and you can run it from a command line or use an IDE.

https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/program/wolframsc...

> Mathematica is literally the worst PL I've ever used

Have you used Maple? I had to for a General Relativity course, and far preferred Mathematica and its syntax.

I mean, I wouldn't make a website with it, but for computational/mathematical code I'd choose Mathematica and its editor over a Lisp language any day, even if it's just for the syntax (though it most certainly is not). Some of us actually find it easier to understand and write math when it looks like math and not just a wall of parentheses or ASCII art.

That's why basically all Lisp systems in that area (Macsyma, Maxima, Axiom, REDUCE, ...) provide non-lisp syntax programming.

You mean like Macsyma, now Maxima, where he probably got some early ideas from?

Mathematica (SMP) started out as a Macsyma clone. Here is a anecdote of how Wolfram went about this with his usual humility:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.lang.lisp/BUxXH76CYdc/I...

That's a more direct way of making my point ;-) I don't recall seeing that Pitman post before... good stuff. Interesting to see that Wolfram always had his <cough> confidence.

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