I am an inveterate and incorrigible Mathematica user, as most of my “real work” deals with what might be best described in layperson’s terms as “symbolic math”.
Even though Wolfram has not (yet? hope always dies last!) released a version of Mathematica for the iPad (meaning, a frontend notebook coupled to an actual onboard computing kernel) they have released a client for “Wolfram Online” (often referred to as “Cloud Mathematica”) offering. This isn’t quite what I would like, as there’s a significant range of circumstances where I cannot rely on network access (such as when flying) but for most other situations it suits the purpose.
Other mathematics-inclined apps allow even greater range of onboard functionality (Pythonista, MathSudio spring to mind).
Upshot: one can most definitely do significant amounts of data analysis on an iPad.
Somebody's buying enough licenses to keep them in business. You either find a computer algebra system useful for what you do or you don't. My needs are pretty simple and Wolfram Alpha works well for me when I need something like that. Better than GNU Maxima, which I also like.
Stephen Wolfram made his early reputation in part by being one of the first people to seriously use Macsyma for physics. No, I don't know any physicists that take A New Kind of Science that seriously, but that's a different story.
Jupyter is hot, but it's not novel. The Mathematica notebook interface was an innovation and is still best-in-class in my opinion.
Thank you for sharing. It's interesting (and perhaps obvious in hindsight) that Wolfram has great math in the background, but struggles with the freeform interface.
I use my university Mathematica license rather than use WolframAlpha because I can never figure out exactly what the latter can do. Wolfram Language, in contrast, has ok enough documentation and a predictable programming model. (It's not perfect---I have a long list of complaints about its design---but it seems to be the best for the kinds of symbolic calculations I'm doing right now.)
Mathematica user here. It is nice that the Wolfram language has an insane amounts of builtin features (graphics, charts, massive amount of math functionality, tables, database stuff, GPU, 3D printing, blockchain, audio analysis, web scraping, one load function that can interpret over 100 different file formats...etc) it is insanely powerful for a lot of things.
Some of the drawbacks are that it is closed source, costs money (although cheap as far as this kind of software generally goes), but most importantly the succinct benefits of the language can make it painful to deal with. Yes, I can probably write 3 lines to do something that would take a 1/2 page of Python, but I first need to know which of thousands of functions to use and the eccentricities of the language. I'm sure Wolfram employees are that skilled, but I'm not and will not be anytime soon.
With that being said, I spent a few hours writing a notebook demonstrating key fundamental and scientific formulas in my industry this weekend. It was easy and the resulting code, pictures, and graphs look fantastic. I exported it as a PDF for others to use. Even the console is pretty cool. I think it would be a very popular language and environment if it was free and open source. Another problem is running something in production. My solution is to not even bother and just write the final solution in Julia if I need it. I think Mathematica really makes sense though if you're at a lab where everyone else uses it and can pass around Notebooks. In short I really like having it around, but don't like dealing with licensing issues.
The Programming Cloud is specifically focused around workflows and features that programmers are likely to want and need.
So I doubt any of us would have told you that the Programming Cloud is "Mathematica running on our servers with better data store and NLP integration." That's not the way we think or talk internally about our technology stack, and its certainly not the way we talk to customers.
Mathematica is wonderful in terms of sheer computational power, but the notebook interface it presents is hopelessly outclassed nowadays by initiatives such as these. I keep hoping Wolfram will spring some impressive new interface on us that will enhance usability for power users (rather than their weird attempts at bringing ‘computation’ to random casual users), but... I'm giving up hope.
The funny thing about all this is that I think - despite all his bluster - that Wolfram is basically right about how uniquely powerful this stuff is in terms of making advanced symbolic programming with complex data accessible and visible, and in providing a rich-text notation to express computations. I think that Mathematica genuinely captures a piece of what it would mean to have a computer as a mind-amplifier, a tool rather than a mere appliance, one which is frictionless and accessible enough to be usable by everyday people. I think he's actually on to something (as opposed to merely being on something).
...The problem is that it's attached to the rest of the Wolfram language - a painfully awkward Lisp-ish thingy dependent on an expensive closed-source platform and a standard library that seems to contain everything you could ever possibly need to do ... but which is so intimidatingly enormous that you can't keep track of it, which turns every program into a trek through the documentation in case there's something there that already does what you need (and then trying to figure out how to plumb all these bits together.) You can do virtually anything with the Mathematica standard library ... which is good, because trying to actually write de novo code is despair-inducing.
And Steve doesn't seem to be able to recognize that Paragraph 1 is ultimately crippled for widespread utility by Paragraph 2.
I do hope that eventually someone manages to take the notational insights of the Wolfram language and apply them to some other platform. There's a vague vision in my head of something that combines aspects and insights of Wolfram/Mathematica, HyperCard, Jupyter, and Excel[1] to create a truly flexible and accessible end-user programming environment.
[1] people really underrate Excel as a programming environment, honestly. Yes, it's crippled and leads people to produce massive gross un-debuggable hellsheets ... but there's reasons (beyond just "it was the only usable software that could be run on office computers") that end users with a problem to solve keep turning to it despite those flaws. The combination of reactive programming, data-first visibility, no hidden state, decent approximations to structured programming by way of click-drag-and-copy-paste, and being able to reference variables and values without needing to name them has some kind of magic to it. There's quite a bit of interesting research on how to take something like Excel and turn it into a non-crippled programming environment - spreadsheet-defined functions (including recursion, lambdas, and higher-order functions natively in the spreadsheet environment, without having to drop into VBA!), dynamic arrays, an alternate computation-first textual view that exists simultaneously with the data-first spreadsheet view, first-class complex data structures ...
Anybody on HN using Wolfram/Mathematica at work? It seems like a massive tower of math software (possibly larger than MATLAB even), but I've been a bit daunted to ever get into it. I have no idea if it's usable for anything outside of academic research.
SageMathCloud is amazing: https://cloud.sagemath.com/, for those that want to try it out. Lots of neat bonus features like Python notebooks, Latex support, and even terminal access. The free tier works great for most applications.
Even though Wolfram has not (yet? hope always dies last!) released a version of Mathematica for the iPad (meaning, a frontend notebook coupled to an actual onboard computing kernel) they have released a client for “Wolfram Online” (often referred to as “Cloud Mathematica”) offering. This isn’t quite what I would like, as there’s a significant range of circumstances where I cannot rely on network access (such as when flying) but for most other situations it suits the purpose.
Other mathematics-inclined apps allow even greater range of onboard functionality (Pythonista, MathSudio spring to mind).
Upshot: one can most definitely do significant amounts of data analysis on an iPad.
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