I’ve used Mathematica at university, it’s so great! Creating fractals, animations and so on is so easy and intuitive.<p>The problem though is that Wolfram is a walled garden. When you think about integrating it in an enterprise environment, you get hit by such high costs, it stops making sense. Imagine if they open sourced it, I feel like their products have so much utility, buried deep down Wolfram ecosystem and conventions.
It doesn't make sense even for academia. Reproducibility is an issue and as we've seen with recent fraudulent claims in major publications - it's what is going to be used for verification of research.<p>Many years back while in grad school I could not reproduce a result from a paper. Thankfully they had provided the data as public but not the code. I emailed the authors and got some matlab code back. My university didn't have a matlab subscription. Octave saved me there since the syntax is similar.<p>But with something like mathematica and the price of it you will never be able to have a wide verification of the result if the software is not free.<p>Also, a lot of things in industry gain traction first in academia (especially math tools). So unless academic traction is dealt with mathematica's headway in industry will remain limited. They are still a profitable company. So I'm guessing there are deep pocketed clients who purchase the tooling.
This problem is very visible in Physics with software such as COMSOL, which many papers use. The licenses are so crazy expensive, that verifying any paper is difficult.
The situation you’re describing is probably why Python is the defacto language of Machine Learning to this day.
True but also for a one of piracy exists just use a cracked copy of it and be done with it
Not practical in research. Doesn't solve the blackbox reproducibility problem. Also it makes the act of publishing a paper under your name practically a crime confession, as it's easy for companies to comb the literature to seek people publishing results obtained with software X without a license.
How do you run cracked/pirated copies of software? I stopped pirating software decades ago due to malware risks.
Mathematica has a lot of clients in math and engineering. Traditionally these clients are not so concerned about software engineering issues you mention. What Mathematica offers also makes sense for small firms with a few engineers, because they can leverage their vast amount of ready to use functions and libraries. But I agree that for medium to large size companies it stops making sense.
Here are some alternatives (some internally use free Wolfram engine):<p>Reimplementation in Rust: <a href="https://github.com/ad-si/Woxi" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ad-si/Woxi</a><p>WLJS Notebook: <a href="https://wljs.io" rel="nofollow">https://wljs.io</a><p>VS Code extension: <a href="https://github.com/vanbaalon/wolfbook" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/vanbaalon/wolfbook</a>
There is also SageMath and Mathics. Not replacements but close.
> Reimplementation in Rust<p>It's so disappointing to see CLAUDE.md in projects like these. Basically rules it out for serious use.
True but on the other hand it is really impressive how Stephen Wolfram managed to build a viable company around scientific software.
Wolfram is $4000/seat for a perpetual commercial license with support. [1] $4000 will only buy a middling Mac Tool tool chest…and not the tools to put in it.<p>[1] a personal perpetual license is only $400.
I loved Mathematica. I was so sad about having to use Python math packages in industry.
Wolfram did have Visual Studio API integration at one point, and it was useful reducing algorithmic symbolic design complexity. However, it was mostly the academically controversial assumptions that Mathematica makes that undermined its credibility in many faculties.<p>For example, when digging into GNU Octave you will find many of its libraries were built on peer reviewed legacy code provably reproducible with prior aerospace published works.<p>The problem with closed source academic programs isn't features or even quality, but rather one of traceable Metrology and scientific rigor. =3
I'm aways surprised that there's no open source language that provides everything you get with Wolfram language. For example, the level of pattern matching you can use when defining functions, as well as the high level of functional composition. It is like having a mix of APL, Lisp, and Prolog that is very productive to use.
From a strict PL perspective, the Wolfram/Mathematica language is rather based on a term rewriting paradigm. The languages Maude, Pure and TXL would be examples of something that's broadly comparable but more generic. In general, it turns out to be a fairly niche paradigm that's not very useful outside of symbolic computing itself, or related fields such as modeling of PL syntax and compiler internals.
There is Mathics: <a href="https://mathics.org/" rel="nofollow">https://mathics.org/</a><p>It doesn't cover the full standard library of Mathematica but the syntax is very similar and a lot of functionality is there.
Wolfram language is the easy part to implement<p>Its standard library is almost impossible to reproduce in its enterity<p>If those libraries were like regular code that got published to Github or something like that.. like pypi or npm or crates.io or whatever. And if mathematica had a lean standard library. It would be very feasible to implement a clone that's basically compatible<p>I mean. Depending on just wolfram rather than random open source contributors has benefits, for example it's more resistant to supply chain attacks. Indeed the npm model is not <i>good</i>. But, it is open, and that's what enabled for example deno and bun to have some compatibility with node
> "...the level of pattern matching you can use when defining functions, as well as the high level of functional composition..."<p>This sounds like your average functional programming language. The Scicloj community is the first thing to come to mind (but I assume they don't do symbolic algebra/calculus like Mathematica does), but I don't know what you're specifically missing.
IT doesn't even need to be open source, a walled garden that you can afford is perfectly fine. Someone's going to find the cracks in the wall anyway.<p>But a walled garden that costs $400 for <i>personal</i> use (we're ignoring yearly licensing, because f that noise) is utter nonsense, and the clearest sign you have no idea how to sell and then upsell products to users over the course of several years.
I always compare the difference between Mathematica/Wolfram Language and Python to the difference between Classical Latin and English.<p>I don't really like English from a linguistic point of view (as a non-native speaker). It's a hodgepodge of other languages and has so many exceptions, it's not very elegant. But it's so ubiquitous and useful that one basically has to know English today.<p>On the other hand, Latin is beautiful and pure. There's more rules, but very few exceptions. But unless you study catholic theology or something along those lines, it's basically useless.<p>Which one maps to Wolfram Language and which one to Python is probably obviously.
Latin is beautiful, but its purity and regularity may be overstated because of its prestige.<p>There are irregular verbs, sometimes with complete suppletive replacement of principal parts by what used to be other verbs (e.g. sum, esse, fui, futurus; fero, ferre, tuli, latum). There are verbs that use passive forms with active meaning (deponents) or perfect forms with present meaning (defectives).<p>There are arguably completely missing forms in the verbal inflection system (the Romans knew that some forms plausibly "should" exist, especially based on a Greek grammatical model, but simply didn't have them!).<p>There is sometimes unpredictability in which noun case should be used with a particular verb.<p>The noun declensions are apparently based on two different sets of Indo-European noun inflection paradigms, so nouns with similar nominative forms can end up being declined very differently.<p>There are ambiguities where different noun forms coincide, which can even create parsing ambiguities in literature (like confusion between ablatives and datives, many of which look identical).<p>The extent to which the perfect stem of a verb can be predicted from the present is limited, as sometimes stem reduplication is used, but sometimes just suffixation of something like -vi.<p>There are loanwords, even classically, from Etruscan, Greek, and to a lesser extent other Mediterranean languages (just thinking of that "hodgepodge" issue).<p>The meanings of purpose clauses with the verbs of fearing are arguably backwards from the English point of view (although I think the Latin version does make plenty of sense).<p>Native and nonnative speakers couldn't easily agree in antiquity about whether vowel length should be contrastive and (I think) whether consonant aspiration was phonemic. I guess the native speakers' opinion should matter more, except there promptly became such huge numbers of non-native speakers that they started to have a really humongous influence on the language.<p>There are spelling changes even within the classical period, so there isn't quite one single classical Latin orthography.<p>I guess there are many fewer irregular verbs overall compared to Germanic languages (which historically have had up to hundreds of at least partly irregular verbs). But if we want to count unpredictability of Latin perfect stems (which is somewhat akin to the main source of irregularity in the Germanic verbs: stem changes) as a kind of irregularity, Latin will also have quite a lot of these.
> Which one maps to Wolfram Language and which one to Python is probably obviously.<p>I've programmed quite a bit with both Python and Mathematica, and I've read through your comment a few times, but I still can't figure out which is which. <i>Both</i> languages are hodgepodges of other languages with lots of special cases (which I would consider to be a good thing since it gives you so much flexibility).
It’s a nice analogy but Latin has tons of weird idioms and exceptions. Been a while since I did it, but<p>1)the locative vs the ablative, and the locative only existing for a few words<p>2)the irregular verbs such as sum, eo etc, irregular nouns such as deus, aqua etc, and there’s a bunch of irregular like adjectives and stuff that I don’t remember<p>3)indeclinable nouns that just don’t decline at all and are the same in all cases. I think the word for “morning” is like this but it’s been a very long time. There are a few words that work this way anyway.<p>4) Words like “castrum” which just mean something totally different in the plural to the singular. “Castrum” means a fort, but the plural “castra” doesn’t mean many forts, it means a (singular) military camp.<p>5) Words like “Saturnalia” (festivals of Saturn) which only exist in the plural. As far as I know you can’t say one festival of Saturn in latin.
Almost all languages have exceptions and traditional grammars are just academic study of grammars.
The AI assistant complaints track with what I see on my end. Any general model I throw Wolfram Language at does noticeably worse than it does on Python. That part isn't surprising. There just isn't much public Wolfram code to learn from next to the mountain of Python sitting on github. It keeps guessing function names that sound plausible but don't exist. Spent an afternoon last week fixing hallucinated options on an NDSolve call it gave me.
I'm a huge fan of Mathematica; I've been a subscriber for many years. There's much to love about the product, but its AI assistant isn't among them.<p>Claude Caude is much better at Mathematica than Wolfram's own AI assistant. I think they flat-out acknowledge the very limited abilities of Mathematica's AI assistant in this version 15 announcement.<p>The Wolfram AI assistant is so bad I unsubscribed from it. By the sounds of it, a basic AI assistant is offered included with subscriptions now. I feel it's borderline criminal they were charging for their hallucinatory AI assistant in the past.
Hissab - <a href="https://hissab.io" rel="nofollow">https://hissab.io</a> is a Free and opensource alternative to Wolfram
Here are some other alternatives (some internally use free Wolfram engine):<p>Reimplementation in Rust:
<a href="https://github.com/ad-si/Woxi" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ad-si/Woxi</a><p>WLJS Notebook:
<a href="https://wljs.io" rel="nofollow">https://wljs.io</a><p>VS Code extension:
<a href="https://github.com/vanbaalon/wolfbook" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/vanbaalon/wolfbook</a>
According to <a href="https://github.com/rawbytess/hissab" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/rawbytess/hissab</a>, it's not even close to being an alternative to Wolfram. Hissab is described as "A strict, unit-aware natural-language calculator" and its syntax looks nothing like Wolfram. It reminds me of Wolfram Alpha, though.
If Stephen Wolfram really wanted wide adoption of Wolfram Language, he would give it an open-source license and release its source. As things stand it's an expensive walled garden whose costs outweigh its advantages.<p>A quote from the linked article: " ...year after year building an ever taller tower of ideas and technology ..."<p>That's an accurate description of the Wolfram empire -- every year it becomes a more expensive, less accessible, vertical tower. Meanwhile, people intent on disseminating useful knowledge do so by growing <i>horizontally</i> -- Python, Linux, many others, all open-source.<p>Historical figures would be astonished at what Wolfram is trying to do -- they would say, "Wait ... you can't patent mathematics!" No, but you can try.
Obviously open source is a significant virtue. Mathematica has some strength in closed source, I doubt it could be as self consistent and backwards compatible if people could depend on the implementation as the use contract as opposed to the documentation. It would obviously have had more features earlier, but would that have made the perpetual support, cointegration, or documentation suffer? I'm not blind to the downsides, but I do perceive upsides, and those may contribute to Mathematica's niche.
symbolic music features are interesting! they should add chroma!
I saw those and got excited; I've been using Mathematica for decades and do a lot of work with symbolic music.<p>Unfortunately they are <i>extremely</i> surface level in this release. It looks like there isn't even any ability to load/export MusicXML, kind of weird low level primitives and zero interesting higher level functions. Hopefully they keep iterating on it but I don't think it'll be useful for my workflow right now.
I remember using it in my college days in the 90s.<p>People joining my company from academia usually know Mathematica along with Python or R.<p>When we tell them we don’t use Mathematica they are sometimes initially concerned. They are typically quite opinionated and I have yet to hear an employee complain about no longer having access to Mathematica. Or SPSS, SAS, or MiniTab for that matter.
The mathematica solve function is a lot of fun to use.
Does anyone use this outside of college classes? It looks so great in these demos but I never hear of companies using it.
I have used at work a lot for some projects (device physics modeling stuff)
it has the nicest calculator syntax (imho) among the tools i've tried (python/julia/array langs/matlab/etc...) with extensive docs for each function and a nice notebook interface, but i've never written a program in it that was longer than one expression.
It used to be pretty popular for mathematical modeling in quantitative finance.
Not industry, but it's pretty popular among theoretical physics researchers.
I had it in an engineering inner sanctum of Apple. had used it since it came out in 1988 on campus in Illinois, and folks in Apple definitely knew it. Not sure who all was doing what with it.
Still nowadays? My impression is that in (pure) math it's lost most of its market share in the last few years. But maybe that's only in my circles.
I just learned that Stephen Wolfram himself is a bit of a crank apparently.
<a href="https://youtu.be/fO9iRDPXvT4?si=CbCjBtOSM5JhgYUF" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/fO9iRDPXvT4?si=CbCjBtOSM5JhgYUF</a>
This is well known, old news.<p>I would not call him a crank, he's just an "independent physicist". He is a very successful and wealthy businessman thanks to Mathematica, with $100Ms of wealth presumably, and he choses to do physics in his own way, pursuing subjects that he finds interesting, in ways he finds interesting. And he writes about his work and himself in grandiose ways, usually comparing himself to Newton and Einstein.<p>Nothing major has come out of his research, other then one of his co-workers proving that one of the simple CAs is Turing complete.<p>Most academic physicists ignore him, but that's fine. Personally, I think we need more people like Wolfram who are doing totally independent research, with their own funds. Statistically, something unexpectedly good could come out of it!<p>His latest research subject is Ruliology:<p><a href="https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2026/01/what-is-ruliology/" rel="nofollow">https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2026/01/what-is-ruliolog...</a>
It's easy to find Wolfram tedious but I've not seem him be particularly disruptive to other efforts nor did his crankery lead to his current success. He's on the same level with Eric Weinstein. Your best bet is to ignore them.
I'd like to push back on that comparison. At least unlike Weinstein, Wolfram produced a genuinely impressive and useful piece of software, which empowers scientists and students worldwide. While his physics work is a little questionable and not too interesting, he doesn't seem to care too much what other people think. He'd never latch on to some podcast bro to give his ideas a wider reach. All Weinstein does is drop big names left and right and whine about how Big String Theory has taken over modern physics and suppresses free thinkers.
The linked video is a must-see -- it's one of those rare video essays that shed more light than heat.
I like the changes they’ve made to the backend in the AI era because now if you input “weight of 1 cup of sugar” into WolframAlpha it says 202 grams and if you put in “weight of 1 cup of sucrose” it says 376 grams.<p><pre><code> I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend it. - Harry Emerson Fosdick</code></pre>
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