Wolfram Mathematica

“I love those, once you determine the variables and make it interactive concepts come alive.”

“it's proprietary and so there is no guarantee it will survive the dissolution of the company”

“Both Apple Numbers and Mathematica still depend on a proprietary software package from a for-profit company though.”

“have been a happy Apple Numbers and Wolfram Mathematica (and SPSS, PSPP, and R, and Python) user ever since”

“Mathematica now has an MCP which I use regularly from Claude Code. It's nice not having to write the lengthy Mathematica expressions by hand.”

“There are decades of work in Mathematica and the Wolfram Language, with a lot of carefully made design decisions”

“They spent a lot of effort on consistent naming. It's basically equivalent of hundred of open source math/visualization packages merged into one”

“I always preferred Mathematica for that to SymPy since it's baked in to the language much more.”

“There is good value in preserving access to codebases made for Wolfram language which is expensive”

“I often found starting up Mathematica and just playing around with some computation is sometimes useful.”

“it is really impressive how Steven Wolfram managed to build a viable company around scientific software”

“it could be as self consistent and backwards compatible if people could depend on the implementation”

“the level of pattern matching you can use when defining functions, as well as the high level of functional composition”

“Mathematica is overkill for arithmetic, in addition it's licenced and can cost a bit extra.”

“it is more often than not faster to write out a simulation or design in a language I know inside out like fortran or mathematica”

“in my experience LLMs tend to hallucinate a lot when you ask them to write Wolfram or Mathematica code”

“LLMs tend to hallucinate a lot when you ask them to write Wolfram or Mathematica code”

“Mathematica's symbolic solve sure is very useful, but numeric solutions are what really makes the art of finding integrals much less relevant.”

“Yes, it is all proprietary, but there are still ways to inspect most of the WL-implemented functions”

“So double-click selected a whole word (as in all editors), triple-click selected all the comma-separated multiple args of a function”

“It was eye-wateringly expensive and required a high-end system, though. It was good, and I liked it too”

“Mathematica is a complete programming environment with an insanely featureful standard library.”

“Mathematica is great for quick stuff, but once you hit a particular level complexity it goes crazy.”

“No need to import dependencies - everything's included and consistent, very readable - yet compact - syntax”

“by making their language and tooling closed and paywalled they doomed it to never be relevant to an LLM ever”

“the core language is just not very performant on modern cpus, so not the best tool for real-world applications”

“the question is whether wolfram language offers enough over python+scipy+sympy to justify the licensing cost and ecosystem lock-in”

“It's a great blend of Lisp and APL, wrapped up in a notebook interface with first-class interactivity.”

“Arguably Mathematica is even more cohesive because it's not split up into "feature sold separately" packages.”

“every little Mathematica design feature to be incredibly well thought out, logical, and consistently implemented”

“Mathematica is definitely great for interactive use, but I'm not really aware of anyone aside from Wolfram himself who tries to deploy it at scale.”

“I would see that as a huge advantage, which allows for very powerful programming and meta-programming techniques.”

“I've had it installed on my laptop for over two decades, and I use it maybe once a year for actual work.”

“Mathematica is much better at data processing, symbolic manipulation, drawing plots, and other similar tasks.”

“having an interactive graphical environment, debugging experience and optimisation when needed”

“I'm a non-mathematician and I used it for lots of novel stuff - GIS, visualisations of all kinds, machine learning.”

“As an expensive proprietary software however, it is deemed to stay a niche product mainly for academia.”

“I have no idea how a software that still does essentially the same thing as it did in 1988 can be that sluggish.”

“using words and imagery to explain what is happening, and only using the equations to prove the words are true.”

“I switched to using Wolfram Mathematica's symbolic expansion and simplification followed by a C code generation step.”