Comment by fsh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fsh | Hacker News Reader

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I agree that Mathematica is extremely powerful, but in my opinion calling it polished is quite a stretch.

The notebook interface has a look and feel as if it was hacked together in two weeks in 2004. Kernel startup and function evaluations can be extremely slow (how the hell did Mathematica 1 run on 1988 hardware?). Sometimes, long-running evaluations can be interrupted, sometimes doing it crashes the kernel. The arcane functional programming language makes writing procedures extremely painful (control flow is handled by nesting If[] functions). Plots are borderline unreadable by default. Customizing them is very complicated and inflexible compared to OOP-based plotting libraries in other languages. Many features don't work at all. I once tried exporting an animated plot as a video file, and most codecs were simply broken. Sometimes PDF exports of plots are Megabyte sized for no good reason.

Instead of fixing such basic stuff, Wolfram keeps adding cloud features that nobody asked for and machine learning stuff that nobody uses. For the vast majority of users, Mathematica 7 is functionally identical to Mathematica 13. Unfortunately, there still is no real alternative, so everyone keeps giving them lots of money for a frankly very unfinished product.

> Plots are borderline unreadable by default

Really? Of all your complaints that one seems the least true, in my experience. I think plots are lovely by default, but then 5% of the time it’s crap and then I’m cursing, with you, at how alien and annoying the whole thing has become.

I used Mathematica in 1988 on a Mac and have been grateful that my employment has given me free access ever since. The notebook interface feels basically the same to me as it did in 1988, when it was an incredible innovation. Now, it is a little annoying.

I also don’t know what feels unfinished about it, but it sounds like you’ve spent more time wrestling with it than me. It has been an incredibly enduring product that still wins at symbolic math. And I also hope open source tools can replace it in my work.

In my opinion, the axes labels are way too small and in a weird location, the lines are too thin, and the default color cycle has many colors that are indistinguishable for people with red–green color blindness (8% of all men). I have been in many meetings where someone could not read some of the Mathematica plots on the slides.

How about defining you own PlotTheme and setting $PlotTheme in init.m? It’s been supported since version 10, I believe.

I agree with your specific comment. And in the more general sense (as I've repeated elsewhere) that user ergonomics of much software sucks big-time.

In the case of red-green (or any) color blindness the simple solution is to provide either a choice of predefined colors and or ways of manually overriding the defaults—and in relative terms the extra programming effort needed to provide this useful functionality is a trivial matter.

Sotware manufacturers really do have a damned hide when they omit such important features especially when the need for them is so obvious.

BTW, I'm not color blind but I've witnessed situations as you've mentioned, so too would have the program's software developers. That they've not attended to the matter makes it all the more annoying.

"Instead of fixing such basic stuff, Wolfram keeps adding cloud features that nobody asked for and machine learning stuff that nobody uses."

Unfortunately, Wolfram is not alone and it's the curse of the software industry. There are hundreds upon hundreds of examples of programs where new usually-unwanted features are added at the expense of unfixed bugs and important features that are badly implemented and need attention but which its developers keep ignoring.

The problem ultimately boils down to us users—first, we don't complain loudly enough about obvious problems and second, we're all too taken in with promises from marketing departments about the benefits the new glitzy features will bring but which rarely live up to expectations.

What we don't collectively realize is that poorly finished software with bad user ergonomics is enormously costly to society in terms of wasted human effort and lost productivity when tallied across millions of users.

I qualify that comment from my own experience both as an IT professional and as someone who has run an IT department. Personally over the years I've lost thousands of hours trying to get buggy or poorly implemented software to do some of the most basic of core functions that ought to work properly from the outset. Same goes for typical users who are forever calling on my department's help desk to solve problems that ought not exist.

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