Comment by vtail | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vtail | Hacker News Reader

I’m a big, big fan of Wolfram Language - as a recreational mathematician and programmer, there is nothing else I would rather do my explorations with.

As always in these discussions, I expect many people will start complaining about how expensive Mathematica is, and how Stephen Wolfram is very shortsighted with his pricing, and how open sourcing it would truly unlock all the potential of the system.

And I seriously doubt this point of view. Open sourcing is not a magic dust that automatically makes everything better. While it works in some cases, it doesn’t work in others - and not having a competitive open source mathematical system is a prove of that.

Hiring people to develop and evolve complex algorithms, on work on improving the UI and making it work on three different OSes, or curate and maintain the knowledge library, takes a lot of effort. I’m actually surprised they don’t price it higher!

Disclaimer: And yes, I live in a developed country, so $250/year for a personal license is not a substantial cost for me. I’m sure that somewhat biases my position.

In agreement: Creating "polished" software is enormously costly in time and effort, and involves the kind of work that people only tend to do for money: Elaborate GUI's, installers for multiple platforms, etc. Keeping specialized domain knowledge experts happy over a long time span costs money, because they probably know that they could jump ship and do mainstream development for even more money.

And the tools have to do everything because people outside of the programming world can't implement missing features themselves. Programmers can create programming tools, but mechanical engineers can't create CAD tools.

Of course there are downsides: Giving up everything that you get with open-source is a lot. Creating "everything" tools makes them bloated. Having to follow the rules of marketing encourages planned obsolescence and a continual upgrade cycle. Finite resources encourages focusing on "core competency" rather than making general purpose tools.

The choice to use less-polished but free tools is a tradeoff that makes sense for most programmers, and people like myself who are not employed as programmers per se, but do a lot of programming to support our work.

If someone wants to develop a free "alternative," their best bet is to piggy-back on existing free tools. So for instance, a programming language benefits from free text editors. A specialized math or science tool might benefit from being served up as a package with a Python API. And so forth.

> Open sourcing is not a magic dust that automatically makes everything better.

I think it does.

The market is then on ideas. Long term, someone will build an open core business model around Mathics (or similar) and that’ll create an incentive for Wolfram to reprioritize and pursue the best ideas.

The same will happen for this new biz with the open core business model. It will continue to fray as industry figures out what the market wants, pruning poor ideas/execution and rewarding good ideas/execution.

Let’s go!

Respectfully, I disagree with that premise. That clearly hasn’t happened with OpenSage, Maxima, or half a dozen other old open source computer algebra systems, many of which were around as long as Mathematica.

If the open sourcing a system works as you describe - why haven’t those system received even a tenth of a polish that Mathematica has, over all these years?

I have my answer: because, even with all its warts, producing something of Mathematica quality requires tremendous coordinated efforts of hundreds of highly qualified professionals who need to be tightly coordinated.

If you try the “next best thing” - a few core enthusiasts plus a large number of users who do occasional contribution you can get to (an impressive) quality level of the above mentioned alternatives, but not higher.

It's true that Mathematica has more polish than Sage, but conversely Sage has vastly more pure math functionality than Mathematica (Mathematica seems to me to have focused on data analytics and neglected mathematics), so the projects just have different focus.

You’re missing the ingredient of time.

Software (as an industry) was born with the right structure. That’s why it moves so quickly.

Other industries (incl. research) need to fix internal problems before they can accelerate, i.e. tightening feedback loops such as procurement cycles. Over time, institutions who can do more with less will outmaneuver even Wolfram.

The future of the world isn’t limited by one guy leading one company.

> Open sourcing is not a magic dust that automatically makes everything better.

> I think it does.

I think that it does not automatically make it better, although open source does improve the potential for making it better, compared with not making open source.

There are also other advantages of FOSS, too. Even if you do not modify it, there are benefits to examine the code to find undesirable behaviours, reading the code to figure out something that cannot be figured out from the documentation, avoiding worrying about copyright issues as much as proprietary code, etc. And then, further benefits may be possible if the code might be modified, too.

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