I've devoted my life to beating Mathematica for general symbolic math use. Don't tell me I can't. :-)

I took a "Computer Algebra" class in undergrad which was taught entirely in Mathematica. It was a lot of work to convert everything (and the instructor would jokingly refer to me as "sage guy") but I got an awful lot out of using Sage instead. What keeps me from using sage nowadays is that I have a great jupyter workflow, and last time I used Sage it was just a worse version of that with better symbolic support.

Sage 7.4 now includes Jupyter as our main personal notebook UI.

Just went to sagemath.org to check it out. The link to the changelog is broken.

My editor was concerned about the two names, Sage and SageMath. As far as I could tell they're just synonyms, but do you have any guidance about which is to be used when?

Thanks. In the meantime, see https://github.com/sagemath/sage/commits/master or https://git.sagemath.org/sage.git/

The official name is SageMath, but you can call it Sage for short.

Tried it. Dumps core as soon as it's started. I'll look for a place to file a bug report, but thought I would mention it here. Ubuntu 15.10.

I hope you can, someday! Unfortunately, I think Python (as an interface) is one of the things holding Sage back. I very much appreciate having a lispy, mostly functional language when writing mathematics oriented code.

And then, there are the docs....

I appreciate what you do, but your competition has a big manpower advantage and a huge head start. Like I said, I truly do hope you can beat Mathematica at its own game someday, but it doesn't look like that day will be anytime soon.

Keep your chin up. I also don't like hearing the naysayers, and we can still prove them wrong.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7483648

https://lobste.rs/s/eftgy8/switching_ubuntu_from_apple/comme...

Mathematica is super expensive for personal use, unfortunately. Good if you're really into it, but hard as an impulse buy (plus they discriminate based on country and double the price in some places).

Grab a Pi.

Might be slow, but if you set it up to just remote shell into it, then you do get access to Mathematica for a fairly small outlie.

Great way to experiment with the language, though, even if it is a bit slow. Can't argue with a $0 price, and the Pi is fun to play with by itself. :)

You could just emulate a Pi on an x86 PC and run it that way (though it'll probably be slower than a native Pi), see for example: http://www.linux-mitterteich.de/fileadmin/datafile/papers/20...

I use the Home Edition which I bought for just under $300 a while back.

It is a great mathematics playground, although, concerns over being able to peer review the engine or calcs in the software are valid, not for what I use it for.

It is like Emacs for me. I leave it open all day, and just play around in it. The multiple programming paradigms are fun too for coding practice.

It's showing me a price of $310 for the personal edition right now. I think that's worth it if you're going to get a couple hour's usage a month out of it.

In Japan it's $600. I wonder if there's any region checking...

Mathematica is one of the two pieces of proprietary software I use, but I no longer have a free (academic) license so I haven't used it in a while.

But it's very buggy on Linux, and did not work out of the box last time I tried it. It somehow violates the X11 protocols (some window managers have Mathematica-specific workarounds) and in my case the windows were all over and mouse clicks didn't hit the correct positions. I can't justify buying $300 worth of software I need twice a year and I can't trust to work correctly.

I've used SymPy and Maxima but they are not as easy to use. I managed with SymPy to get some results but they were not as well simplifies as Mathematica results. Maxima was nearly impossible to use for me as I have no background in symbolic computation and the documentation expects you to understand the algorithms (e.g. different methods for simplification).

The biggest plus of Mathematica is the docs. They have tons and tons of examples and every function is thoroughly documented. And it is easy enough for me to understand without a lot of math background.

I haven't tried every WM, but I have tried a few and never had a problem. But, yeah, given your issues with your chosen WM and lack of use, I can hardly blame you.

I use a niche WM, so I'm kinda asking for trouble. I'm pretty sure I would not get any support from them.

I noticed that i3 WM has Mathematica specific workarounds. Might be an issue with non-reparenting WMs in general.

> Mathematica is one of the two pieces of proprietary software I use,

One is the other one?

SketchUp for woodworking plans. I've yet to try a few of the open source CAD solutions, I might migrate if I find a good one. For more artistic modelling I use Blender.

I also play games on Windows/Steam but I could live without that. Openttd and Nethack would do :)