Comment by an1sotropy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by an1sotropy | Hacker News Reader

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> 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.

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