News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
[dead]
Re:Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source by mimixco on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @12:49PM (#19556158)
Indeed. And what nonsense about cohesive design. There's nothing cohesive about the design of Wolfram functions and parameters. Often, they're not even documented!

Wolfram is just a huge proprietary library. It's arguably not a language at all. And it has an appalling UI that makes it unsuited for building modern apps for others.

Re:Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source by pilchardbreath on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @02:18PM (#19557041)
Undocumented is not one of its problems: There are 10,000+ pages at http://reference.wolfram.com Not just every function, but many arguments have their own pages - every import format, entity type, method. The problem is finding the right function.
Re:Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source by yummypaint on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @01:36PM (#19556629)
Agreed. It definitely has its uses, but it lacks the self-consistency needed to be a language. Alot of this is for understandable historical reasons, but it has never been smoothed out as it would be in a project with more community involvement. Again that's ok.

Maybe we need something to be to mathematica as octave is to matlab.

Re:Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source by Armisael16 on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @10:45PM (#19560355)
https://www.maplesoft.com/compare/mathematica_analysis/

That you haven't heard of it is perhaps telling.

Re:Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source by carlob on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @04:02AM (#19561645)
Maple is not FOSS and is not a clone, Mathics is to Mathematica as octave is to Matlab.
Re:Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source by sigdigs on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @12:19PM (#19564644)
Not sure why my original comment was flagged. I suspect W's PR people have found this thread and started damage control.
Re:Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source by baud147258 on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @11:34AM (#19555226)
nitpick: throes, not throws