In fact we (Wolfram) hired the primary Mathics developer to work on Mathematica Online, which will be released in the next few months: http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica-online/
For those in search of a FOSS alternative, give Mathics a try: www.mathics.org
In the past couple of months, Mathics had made quite a lot of progress.In particular the upcoming release will run on PyPy. Obviously it still had lots of catching up to do, but being written in python (and some Mathematica) makes development easy and fast. Come join us!
That is a good point and there even is a sort of open source implementation of the Wolfram language, Mathics [1]. Although I would assume its value is kind of limited without the standard library included with Mathematica.
I absolutely feel your pain. As a matter of fact I've been lobbying internally for a refresh of webMathematica for years. Maybe something is going to come out in the near future. Please hold on :)
Opening up access to the wolfram language will let more science be possible using Mathematica and remain reproducible by non-Mathematica users. Must be a good thing.
Mathematica is very powerful, but it's also very expensive and based on a proprietary code base. For me, this is unacceptable and the only solution in my judgement is to build our own.
I have been working really hard on exactly that, and in the past 3 weeks have made the most amazing progress. I don't want to spill the beans just yet, but this is my second attempt at building a better mathematica, and this time around I am using python, the scipy stack, and sage.
I will be releasing the project quite soon, as free open source software, along with a website that is 100% free for everyone. I am really hopeful that I will be able to find like minded programmers who are excited about working on this project together.
If this sounds interesting to you, please reply in comments below, or else reach out to me @calhoun137 on twitter.
I'm one of the authors that spent years building SageMath; indeed, the goal of our project is to create a viable free open source alternative to Mathematica (etc.).
There's an interesting discussion of actual attempts to create open source implementations of the Wolfram Language in Wikipedia under "Implementations" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfram_Language). The first attempt was 30 years ago by Fateman and he received an official cease-and-desist from Wolfram for his attempts; he did a lot of work on open source Maxima as a result.
I think right now https://mathics.org/ is the most complete open source Wolfram Language implementation, and it uses Sympy extensively under the hood. Mathics was dead for a while when the main author got hired by Wolfram (see https://github.com/mathics/Mathics/graphs/contributors), but during the last year there has been an enormous amount of new work on Mathics.
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.
There's Mathics, a subset of the language implemented in Python, but unfortunately after the main author of that was hired by Wolfram, the project seems to have basically died. Still fun for what it is.
could someone advertise mathematica to me? like, how powerful is it? i'm a mathematically trained dev / DE. i'd probably be most interested in exploring rabbit holes as i find them, plotting things, simulating something etc
Beta testers wanted!
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