Hacker News Reader

Comment by Micoloth | Hacker News Reader

It’s a great question. As soneone who has been fascinated by Wolfram Aplha for a loong time (and might or might not have thought about cloning it), i think that growing up i ended up realizing that Mathematica in the real world just doesn’t… Do much?

Maybe i’m just missing something. But it looks like nobody is really using it except for some very specific math research which has grown from within that ecosystem from the beginning.

I think one of the basic problems is that the core language is just not very performant on modern cpus, so not the best tool for real-world applications.

Again- maybe i’m missing something?

View on HN

I used to be a university researcher in theoretical physics and, in that field, everyone uses it, but I suppose that would count as "very specific math research" Any kind of complex integrals, systems of equations, etc. and Mathematica is invaluable, and, as I said, so much ahead of Sympy.

You could do stuff other than theoretical physics research with Mathematica, though. I has a lot of functionality and I always felt that I used only a tiny fraction of it.

What you're missing is everything not on the public Internet. Everything hidden away from you and me. Everything done in secret. If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there, does it make a sound?

but in general... what?

What Micoloth is missing or what I'm saying, is that people are using Wolfram Alpha but don't feel the need to post to Instagram or wherever about it, so Micoloth isn't hearing about it. Micoloth is assuming that because they aren't hearing about it, it isn't happening. I'm pointing out that things can happen that you don't hear about.

I think in practice it's less of a programming language and more of a scripting environment. It's like excel for math. There are many more people using it to produce mathematical results (like how excel is used to produce reports and graphs) than people who use it to produce programs.

This is why its not particularly problematic that it is closed source. Most people I've worked with who use it produce mathematical results with it that are fully checkable by hand.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com