Wolfram Blog

MMA is a fantastic bit of software. It's my secret weapon for lots of tasks, including prototyping algorithms, data manipulation (it absolutely excels at this), visualisation and all sorts of miscellaneous investigatory tasks. I'd love to use it at work but as a Home Edition user my license prohibits this. Were I to accidentally start it at my day job, I'd use it for converting data between various formats, processing it, manipulating it and writing it back again, like a gigantic and insanely powerful interactive awk replacement. Since I maxed out the RAM on my laptop I now have it run at startup so it's always there for back-of-the-envelope stuff.

I used it extensively in designing my side project synth[1], where I used its visualisation capabilities to figure out everything from panning algorithms to delay lines. It earned its keep most often late at night when I was tired and trying to figure out daytime-simple-but-nighttime-hard routines. The Manipulate[] function is really good for this, as it shows you the output of a function as you drag the inputs up and down. I also used it for turning mathematical formulae into C code - the CForm[] function does this very well.

It's also a great way to experiment with functional programming, since that's how it mostly likes to operate.

I reckon there's a lot of places you could use it, but it's too expensive to justify. I don't really care if it's open source or not, but I'd like Stephen Wolfram to have an epiphany on pricing…

I haven't been programming long and don't get the nuances of functional and declarative paradigms. But I have a hunch that even if people made some new languages that balanced out the various concerns of complex compilers, programmer control, LOC, boilerplate, ugly syntax etc, it wouldn't fix much.

So, using research into how people best solve problems, I’m making a tool that helps people solve the problem of having an idea and not being able to make it a reality.

Novices will still have lots of problems. They don't really think about how sprites move in a game, they think they want to make a game kinda like Asteroids or more like Mario. What will really help them is a well organized, well documented template.

The problem is with documenting, organizing and making available the multitude of libraries and solved problems. Making them accessible through visual examples and natural language.

http://blog.wolfram.com/2010/11/16/programming-with-natural-language-is-actually-going-to-work/

The Wolfram approach of writing a query, seeing the output, confirming or rejecting it is the right direction. Memorizing syntax is a big problem.

[1,2,3].byPairs == [[1,2]];
[1,2].byPairs == [[1,2]];
[1].byPairs == [];

This doesn't solve syntax memorization.

split array by pairs == arrayPairTransform([1,2,3]) == [[1,2]]
make array of pairs == arrayPairTransform([1,2]) == [[1,2]]

This is closer imho. You don't really have to worry about the [1,2].byPairs being prettier than…

I side much more Conrad Wolfram on this than Stillwell [1]. Computation simply is a lot less important now as we have tools that do them with far greater speed and accuracy. And I'm from the generation that did tons of computation, but I honestly never had a great grasp of it. I just knew there were steps to be taken (leave an extra space to right as you do long multiplication) -- and I was one of the top math students in the district.

In fact I'd argue that I never really understood much of any math until grad school. I was computational sophisticated, but lacked understanding.

And oddly, I seem to find quite the opposite problem from what the blog author describes. I find students who know 3x5. But struggle to understand when the Fourier Transform is appropriate. Sure, if they're looking at problem sets at the back of the chapter about Fourier Transforms then they'll start with it, but in the real world they lack the conceptual understanding of it. I've met students who can compute the SVD, they can tell you the text book definition, but don't actually intuitively know what it means. They don't know when it should be applied, or when it is applied, what it means.

[1] http://blog.wolfram.com/2010/11/23/conrad-wolframs-ted-talk-stop-teaching-calculating-start-teaching-math/

As another commenter pointed out they are pretty adamant about not going open source [1].

But then later they walked it back a little and claimed they are "like open source" [2]. Funny there are 12 reasons for being closed source and only 6 for being "like" open source. And the reasons they're like open source are pretty weak. The first one (free use) has a lot of restrictions like the way their cloud product locks you out of your files 60 days after they're created.

It's cool what Wolfam has achieved, but it's hard to justify going with a closed tool these days with all the interest in open science and the capabilities that are now available in the open source world.

[1] https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-open-source-a-dozen-reasons/
[2] https://blog.wolfram.com/2021/11/30/six-reasons-why-the-wolfram-language-is-like-open-source/

> His work is definitely worthwhile. Wolfram Language by itself is actually very cool. I really wish he would open source it. I'm not going to use any math package that isn't open source for anything.

Here is the official statements of Wolfram Research on this topic:

> Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source—A Dozen Reasons

> https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-open-source-a-dozen-reasons/

See also

> Episode 1: Thoughts on Wolfram & Open Source

> https://soundcloud.com/wolframresearch/wolfram-on-open-source

If you nevertheless insist on having an open source implementation of the Wolfram language, have a look at the answers at

> https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/4454/is-there-an-open-source-implementation-of-mathematica-the-language

These are most of those I follow... as you'll see, it's very difficult to find good material on maths and physics blogs, or at least I've had difficulties on finding it.

Maths:
http://www.arsmathematica.net/
http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/ (not exactly maths but...)
http://plus.maths.org/blog/
http://terrytao.wordpress.com/
http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/
http://blog.plover.com/ (sometimes)
http://blog.wolfram.com/
http://gowers.wordpress.com/

Physics:
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress (very biased)
http://angryphysicist.wordpress.com/
http://scottaaronson.com/blog
http://motls.blogspot.com/ (very biased)