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Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by teddyh on Friday November 05, 2021 @08:07AM (#29118058)
Making people get used to (and be somewhat dependent on) Mathematica, a very expensive proprietary program, is doing people a large disservice. But it is very profitable for Wolfram.

Also, the “video games make people violent” argument rears its ugly head.

Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by EForEndeavour on Friday November 05, 2021 @08:27AM (#29118221)
If violent video games make people violent, then surely Mathematica makes people want to do more math.
Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by perihelions on Friday November 05, 2021 @08:55AM (#29118504)
Violent video games make me want to do math. Some of the most enjoyable projects seem to stem from theorycrafting questions.

I think Monster Hunter World was the first time I worked out a dynamic programming algorithm in anger.

Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by albrewer on Friday November 05, 2021 @11:31AM (#29120709)
> I think Monster Hunter World was the first time I worked out a dynamic programming algorithm in anger.

Care to elaborate?

Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by EGreg on Friday November 05, 2021 @08:37AM (#29118315)
Why can’t both be true?

There is an argument to be made that gangsta rap made a generation of impressionable kids much more rough around the edges, as it defined the new “cool” for them. Even though it wasn’t “supposed to be for them”, they knew all the words, which are loaded with expletives and misogynistic lyrics, and sowing distrust of the police etc.

Maybe I am just a social conservative but I agree with this lady who tried, in vain, to fight against the capitalist machine that is ths music industry: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr6gb1w72xA

Kids are impressionable — the Merchants of Cool documentary clearly shows how capitalist industries exploit that to sell more stuff: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/showscool/

It also helped shape a rift, in my opinion, between the Black and the White youth that grew up now, which had been closing thanks to Liberalism and efforts to move past it.

Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by GLGirty on Friday November 05, 2021 @10:09AM (#29119463)
Please let's not point fingers at hip hop as if there are not lots of examples of violence in rock, pop, and country. If you suggested "Janie's Got A Gun", "Pumped Up Kicks", and "Goodbye Earl" were making kids more violent, you would be laughed out of the room, Karen.

Music is a reflection of culture, and when there is violence in culture, artists make art out of it to cope. If black music seems more violent to you than white music, please meditate on how much more violence black people experience than white people, and why someone would presume one genre is reactive and another genre is causative.

Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by trutannus on Friday November 05, 2021 @10:30AM (#29119795)
Or the countless songs in the Punk genera about burning down buildings and causing general havoc (like giving someone the wrong time). The set of people who actually commit domestic terrorism (or say no to tea) is much smaller than the set of people who listen to the Sex Pistols for instance. If anything, there's no compelling reason to think they it's the music causing the violence, rather than people who are into that lifestyle selecting an art form that reflects what they already believe.
Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by EGreg on Friday November 05, 2021 @11:04AM (#29120278)
Punk didn't have nearly the distribution, but yes punk rock is the closest I can think of to an analogue for exporting violence to non-Black youth. The other being Italian mafioso movies, creating a stereotype for some to "look up to". If you grew up around Bay Ridge in Brooklyn around those times, you'd see the effect. It isn't a race thing, it's a culture thing where the worst elements are being purposely amplified and distributed to everyone by a movie/music industry.

Why has Blaxploitation became not ok but gangsta rap is still considered “just art” with misogynistic and violent lyrics portraying Blacks self describing themselves as materialistic thugs, they were role models “poppin bottles”? Are women not 50% of the population, why is it OK? Why is it OK to have lyrics about mistreatinf Black women etc. as “just art” and Ice Cube who uses B’s and H words about women in his music comes on to Bill Maher’s show to lecture him about how using the N word even about yourself in a joking way is “not cool”? Yet it is cool to be a non-woman and using slurs against women? I think both are uncool.

Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by GLGirty on Friday November 05, 2021 @04:47PM (#29124572)
You make a good point that hiphop has a misogyny problem, (it also suffers from misogyny's sibling disease, homophobia,) but why keep that issue focused on black music when all music has a misogyny problem[1]. Is Kanye worse than Robin Thicke or The Nails?

[1]https://www.flavorwire.com/489278/25-of-musics-most-obnoxiou...

Edit: Thanks for your Soundcloud link. I like your flow. You make fair points, but I see no evidence that any of the issues you raise are worse in hiphop than any other genre. (Or that hiphop's issues are internally generated, and not amplified by an exploitative industry that makes bank off stereotypes.)

Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by EGreg on Friday November 05, 2021 @10:28AM (#29119756)
Yes but the violence was only in select pockets of inner city culture. The gangsta culture was exported to kids living in perfectly fine neighborhoods. Their parents were away working for corporations (more corporatism) while the kids who were raised by public schools and the street were most susceptible.

If you want to hear the arguments against gangsta rap and the exploitative music industry (exploiting externalities just like any capitalist industry)

Listen to me do it in rap form, from 2015 … and please comment

https://m.soundcloud.com/gregory-magarshak/gangsta-rap

Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by qwerty456127 on Friday November 05, 2021 @09:13AM (#29118716)
I can believe gangsta rap culture may (nevertheless I would require evidence to believe it does) affect kids characters an undesirable way but I can't believe violent computer games can make mentally healthy kids enjoying them to want doing violence in real life. I and many people I knew were such a kids enjoying violent computer games and preferring as much virtual blood and dismembering as possible but doing violence in the real world never ever came into my mind and apparently nobody of the classmates did any either. I also enjoyed crazy and violent driving in Carmageddon and GTA2 but in real life I don't even drive as I believe driving is dangerous.
Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by howLongHowLong on Friday November 05, 2021 @10:10AM (#29119477)
Why is it obvious fictional music crime inspires more real crime than fictional game crime? Just like games, one could come up with random examples of fans doing real world violence, but the vast majority of the suburban kids that prop up the industry are just looking for escapist thrills.
Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by qwerty456127 on Friday November 05, 2021 @05:24PM (#29124888)
I rarely see games significantly affecting the way how do people look and behave in the real world beyond cosplay events. At the same time it is very common for fans of particular music style to dress and behave a specific way so it in fact does affect their behavior at least in some extent, it may also affect what kind of people do they hang out with. Music also usually has a huge degree of influence on the listener's mood and attitude. Games probably have too but apparently in a much less degree. I don't insist any music style is inherently harmful (let alone for everybody) nevertheless I believe music has more potential to be dangerous than games.
Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by kevinventullo on Friday November 05, 2021 @11:56AM (#29121075)
I think you have cause and effect inverted. Gangsta Rap was a response to racial tension and distrust of police.

Or maybe I’m wrong, maybe NWA caused the LAPD to brutalize Rodney King.

Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by burkaman on Friday November 05, 2021 @11:01AM (#29120241)
> There is an argument to be made

Ok, then make the argument. There must be a mountain of evidence if this is true.

Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by lallysingh on Friday November 05, 2021 @11:07AM (#29120319)
How do you feel about cowboy movies?
Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by notTheAuth on Friday November 05, 2021 @09:00AM (#29118569)
There’s an argument to be made that political austerity causes social segregation and people to die in poverty of preventable problems.

Why don’t we set aside the rap battle and Mathematica concerns and focus on well known human society features failing people.

Cut the crap with the pearl clutching “there’s an argument to made other peoples behavior did…” and consider yours as a member of an implicitly caste based society.

Treat yourself like the subject of study instead of abstractly focusing on the flock, dad.

Western psychotherapy role play is the worst personality trait.

Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by golergka on Friday November 05, 2021 @08:41AM (#29118370)
I don't use Mathematica or similar software, so it's an honest question: is there an open source alternative that would be that good?

If there is, then it's a genuine grievance.

But if there's not — what's wrong with paying for a good product? I have yet to see an equally good alternative to other software products, like Excel, Photoshop or Logic Pro. There are alternatives that have the same functions, but none that have the same level of quality.

After all, most of us here on HN are being paid to write code. It's really weird that we would expect to use someone else's software with thousands of years of developers, designers, testers and other professionals without having to pay for it.

Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by dagw on Friday November 05, 2021 @09:11AM (#29118695)
is there an open source alternative that would be that good?

Between SageMath, Numpy, scikit-learn, Pandas, Folium etc. Python can probably match Mathematica feature for feature and even beat it in some cutting edge research areas.

However Mathematica makes it a lot easier to get started if you don't know how to program. Just start Mathematica, enter the equation like it looks on the page in your math book using the equation editor GUI, click solve and you're done. Also since everything is built in you don't have to worry about working out which package implements Moving Median or Facial Recognition.

Mathematica also comes with a bunch of real time data sources which are really fun to play with. Want to plot Germany's GDP vs Natual Gas prices or Gold prices vs global average temperatures? The datasets are there and ready to be explored.

Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by abdullahkhalids on Friday November 05, 2021 @09:45AM (#29119120)
In principle, the Python scientific ecosystem allows you to do everything, but the notation is atrocious and not in line at all with how Mathematics is written on paper. So, people familiar with mathematics can bear the pain, but it's terrible for actually teaching mathematics.

For instance in SageMath, to get the eigenvalues of a matrix M, you have to do A.eigenvalues(). What is that supposed to mean? To a programmer, that means A is an object (in the sense of OOP), and you are calling an internal method on it.

But that's not how you think about mathematics. Mathematics is functional. A mathematician knows that eigenvalues(A) means, to choose an appropriate eigenvalue-finding algorithm and apply it to the matrix A.

The mathematics program should conform to how one should think about mathematics, rather than forcing mathematics students to think like programmers. Mathematica does that.

Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by salamandersauce on Friday November 05, 2021 @11:28AM (#29120661)
There's open source functional options too. The handful of times I've needed a CAS for something I've used Maxima, it's not quite as full featured as Mathematica or Maple but it costs $0 and is open source. There doing "eigenvalues(A)" will do exactly as you describe. You can even get nice front ends that will pretty print the equations in LaTeX.
Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by skolos on Friday November 05, 2021 @09:31AM (#29118929)
I am using a lot of Numpy and Pandas at work and hate them. When I come home I open Mathematica and enjoy every minute of it. It is much more polished, consistent and faster than anything in Python land.

The only place where Python is better if you need to share your code - not everyone has Mathematica license.

Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by BeetleB on Friday November 05, 2021 @11:28AM (#29120650)
> Between SageMath, Numpy, scikit-learn, Pandas, Folium etc. Python can probably match Mathematica feature for feature and even beat it in some cutting edge research areas.

Haven't tried Folium, but from people who are familiar with both: The number of ways Mathematica has an edge over Sage (in terms of math capabilities, not interface), significantly outnumbers the reverse comparison.

Sage is better in a few ways. Mathematica is better in many ways.

Still, for the typical undergrad curriculum, Sage is probably good enough.

Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by jazzyjackson on Friday November 05, 2021 @06:11PM (#29125251)
mathematica just works, I spend 0 time chasing down software dependencies or version conflicts - that alone is worth the license fees.
Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by michaelt on Friday November 05, 2021 @10:12AM (#29119512)
> what's wrong with paying for a good product?

Nothing in principle.

But if we teach people to do math with Mathematica, and they graduate and don't have access to Mathematica any more, how are they going to do math?

Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by golergka on Friday November 05, 2021 @11:59AM (#29121116)
I think it's fairly common, in different professional fields, to teach skills that would require expensive equipment.

Most of the practical lab skills you're taught for doing "wet" biology require quite an expensive lab, and doing computational biology often requires a much more expensive supercomputers.

Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by michaelt on Friday November 05, 2021 @01:55PM (#29122621)
To an extent.

But the MATLAB skills I honed in university have seen little direct use after graduating - because it's faster to teach myself to do whatever it is in Python than to get an employer to adopt MATLAB.

Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by teddyh on Friday November 05, 2021 @09:16AM (#29118746)
> what's wrong with paying for a good product?

You can pay to get access to Mathematica, but you can’t pay to get the freedom you would get from open source. No matter how much you pay, Mathematica is still proprietary. There is, indeed, no price for freedom.

Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by jimhefferon on Friday November 05, 2021 @09:57AM (#29119278)
> what's wrong with paying for a good product?

Here is an editorial from an American Math Society journal that expresses very well one aspect of Mathematica that lots of us find troubling: http://www.ams.org/notices/200710/tx071001279p.pdf

Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by jgamman on Friday November 05, 2021 @04:55PM (#29124646)
Full disclosure: The second author started a new math- ematics software system in 2005 called SAGE
Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by jimhefferon on Friday November 05, 2021 @05:30PM (#29124927)
Yes, one that is fully Free. So he walks the walk.
Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by joppy on Friday November 05, 2021 @09:34AM (#29118971)
I think that software like mathematica is a great tool, and anyone genuinely doing research that would benefit from it should be happy to pay for it as a matter of course. But I can also see many of the downsides to using closed-source software for research (I myself use some, not mathematica but related) - you don’t know what algorithms are being used, and can’t check yourself that they do what you expect, or fix them if they go wrong. For truly research-level questions, checking that an algorithm produces the correct output may be as hard as writing the algorithm itself…
Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by dilawar on Friday November 05, 2021 @09:46AM (#29119138)
Checkout maxima, sympy, and sagemath. I have used maxima and sympy and both are decent. sagrmath is a collection of open source math tools glued by python: it uses both maxima and sympy as backend.
Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by lallysingh on Friday November 05, 2021 @11:05AM (#29120300)
It's a fantastic math education tool. Manipulate[] itself is worth the fee for the home/hobby price. The student price is half of that.

But sure! Take the limited motivation and effort the student's got and make them go through 16th century tech to learn it all.

Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by AlanYx on Friday November 05, 2021 @12:31PM (#29121551)
And hobbyists don't even have to pay the student price since Wolfram has made the full version of Mathematica free (as in beer, not as in libre) for Raspberry Pi users.

It's such a nice, accessible environment for learning. My daughter is still too young to begin exploring SageMath, NumPy, SciPy, etc., but we've had fun together plotting things in Mathematica.

Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by joeman1000 on Friday November 05, 2021 @04:42PM (#29124527)
Uni students get a student license (free), and then can go on to pirate it until they are making good money. At that point they can either pirate it forever or pay a small fee to use it (relative to their income). They could also take the programming skills they picked up and switch to another platform (Python or Julia). Having said that though, I haven’t used anything like Mathematica, which makes symbolic maths very simple. I’ve tried some libraries in python that didn’t cut the mustard (Sympy) and haven’t experimented in Julia yet.
Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by lvl100 on Friday November 05, 2021 @08:37AM (#29118311)
I don’t know if you know but Mathematica inspired a lot of people.
Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by amadeuspagel on Friday November 05, 2021 @11:07AM (#29120321)
> Also, the “video games make people violent” argument rears its ugly head.

Can't stand this kind of rhetoric. Arguments aren't scary monsters.

Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by scionthefly on Friday November 05, 2021 @01:42PM (#29122445)
If you want to use it and not pay a ton for it, buy a Raspberry Pi and it's a free install. (Used to be included with the OS but now you have to go get it).

Obviously you might want to get a nice recent version of the Pi and splurge on getting the max memory, but...it's the cheapest way into Mathematica (and the Wolfram language) other than winning a copy.

Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by jgamman on Friday November 05, 2021 @04:52PM (#29124625)
even easier to just use the free online version - standard freemium model
Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by jazzyjackson on Friday November 05, 2021 @06:10PM (#29125234)
I don’t think a couple hundred bucks a year is that expensive, people spend way more on their smart phone data plans.

The first time I had a problem and received a technical fix via support email, I was sold on being a subscriber. Whether I could justify the commercial license to an employer is another matter…

Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by Qem on Friday November 05, 2021 @11:20AM (#29120526)
These days fortunately we have Python and SymPy eating Mathematica cake.
Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by ivan_ah on Friday November 05, 2021 @02:53PM (#29123329)
Yes! SymPy is a beautiful thing. Between using it on the command line, or in jupyter notebooks, or the live shell online at https://live.sympy.org, students have the best-in-class computer algebra system easily accessible.

For anyone not familiar with SymPy, check out this short tutorial I wrote: https://minireference.com/static/tutorials/sympy_tutorial.pd... ; also available as notebooks https://github.com/minireference/sympytut_notebooks#play .

Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by nix23 on Friday November 05, 2021 @08:53AM (#29118492)
>a very expensive proprietary program, is doing people a large disservice.

You can use it for free if you use a Raspberry Pi (non commercially)

Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by q-big on Friday November 05, 2021 @09:00AM (#29118572)
"proprietary" is the opposite of "free" (as in freedom), not of "free" (as in free beer).
Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by messe on Friday November 05, 2021 @11:28AM (#29120667)
They may have been replying to the statement that it is expensive, rather than anything to do with its proprietary nature.
Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by teddyh on Friday November 05, 2021 @12:05PM (#29121195)
Some people might be able to use it for free, but nobody can use it non-proprietarily.
Re:Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? ... by dqpb on Friday November 05, 2021 @11:50AM (#29120998)
This dialog isn't really about Mathematica.