

New version of Mathematica released - dehowell
http://blog.wolfram.com/2010/11/15/mathematica-8/

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zzleeper
TLDR: Check this instead: <http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/new-in-8/>

The signal-to-noise ratio of that article is incredible low. What did I get
out of the post?

\- You can now type wolframalpha-style in mathematica.

\- You now have over 3000 built-in functions (i.e., too many to remember ;)

The rest was just Wolfram telling the world in many different ways how great
mathematica was/is/will be. Adjectives include: huge, important, dramatic,
breakthrough, major, slow & lumbering (to describe others), etc. Hell, "great"
is mentioned 6 times in the post!

~~~
tumult
Static compilation via C, C metapogramming/manipulation using Mathematica's
symbolic engine, dynamic library linking, GPU use via OpenCL, lots of new
statistics and probability processing/visualization...

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tumult
Can anyone knowledgeable here speak about statistics offer some advice? I'm
about to get into a project where, for the first time, I'll need to do some
statistics processing and visualization. I haven't started on that component
of it yet, and I'm free to choose whatever tool I want. Most of the rest of my
project is in Haskell, but for the processing/visualization of statistics
part, I was thinking of choosing R. Does anyone know how well Mathematica 8,
or other commercial packages, stack up?

~~~
greattypo
R has some basic visualization libraries. The graphs are overall very
functional, but basic. Ex:
<http://www.statmethods.net/advgraphs/images/splotm.png>

Alternatives like Matlab, Maple, Stata all have basically the same 'look' to
their default graphing packages.

Even though Mathematica would not be the right choice for statistical
processing, the graphs it produces are a step above the rest.

So depends what you're use case is.. any of the above would look good enough
for an academic paper. But if you're going to be publishing these in a
magazine, they probably won't cut it.

~~~
mayanklahiri
> R has some basic visualization libraries

If you include CRAN packages, then this couldn't be further from the truth:
<http://addictedtor.free.fr/graphiques/>

R can be made to produce _beautiful_ visualizations.

Edit: here's a link to the top-voted thumbnails of R visualization:
<http://addictedtor.free.fr/graphiques/thumbs.php?sort=votes>

IMO, since it can be scripted from the command line, it's high time Gnuplot
died a graceful death.

~~~
sciboy
I have used R/ggplot for a long time now, and it's exceedingly difficult to
produce beautiful visualizations.

The only thing that makes tufte-quality visualizations in my experience is
hand-building your graphs in tikz.

The graphs you linked to are hideous from an aesthetics point of view; font's
are ugly, data:ink ratio far too low, color choices poor etc.

~~~
wwortiz
Especially when you have such pretty defaults in things like Matlab and
Mathematica.

Matplotlib (<http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/>) is actually the best
opensource library for creating great looking graphs that I have come across,
and is comparable to Matlab and Mathematica.

~~~
sciboy
I've looked at matplotlib but still think it's ugly by default.

Compare to:

<http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/weather-stations-data/>

<http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/rna-codons-table/>

The beauty of tex font's + vector graphics is impressive. Try zooming in on
the sparklines in the first example

------
spitfire
I'm a little disappointed by the opencl/cuda support. I was hoping they'd be
fully integrated with native algorithms in mma. Instead you need to change
your code to call CUDAfft[] or whatnot. It should just choose the right fft to
use, or supply a checkbox in preferences.

~~~
xtacy
Mathematica programming language is somewhat symbolic, like Lisp; so you could
just "rewrite" your expressions to use CUDAfft[] or whatever very easily.

Example:

    
    
      Hold[Times[1,2]] /. (Times -> Plus)

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thebooktocome
Eh. I'm a graduate student in mathematics, and it unless a problem is more or
less trivial, it takes too long to force Mathematica to do what I mean.

Also I agree with a poster below: this press release is really low on the
signal-to-noise.

~~~
dagw
Personally I use Mathematica as a sketchpad for playing around with ideas and
getting a feel for a problem. It is great because I can type in my sloppy half
thought out ideas in a fairly natural syntax and Mathematica will generally do
something sensible with them. Once I've gotten a handle on what I need to do
and actually have to start getting results I leave Mathematica for matlab,
python or C.

That being said I've met some really great Mathematica programmers, and the
stuff they can make that program do with only a few dozen lines of code is
truly amazing.

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anigbrowl
Looks decent - I'll certainly try the demo. Though I'm no mathematician
Mathematica is my favorite Maths playground software.

I'm curious about their implementation of NLP. This has enormous potential as
a teaching tool - the biggest hurdle to getting more out of a package like
this on first use is not knowing how to interact with it. However, I had had
similar expectations of Alpha, and was greatly disappointed. though full of
witty easter eggs and stocked with a rich variety of datasets, exploratory
queries proved sadly frustrating.

Here's what I want to see in version 9 (laugh now, realize I'm right later):
Kinect interaction. Perhaps unwittingly, Microsoft have just launched the next
great peripheral and it seems intuitively popular with the public in a way I
haven't seen for years and years. Now, imagine you've generated or imported a
mathematically-specified 3d object in M., and imagine it inside a bounding box
with handles on the vertices and local minima/maxima. Multi-point, multi-d
interactivity would be both absorbing for students and potentially extremely
productive for professionals, without requiring significant retooling of the
core.

~~~
zitterbewegung
Only problem with that is the fact that Microsoft could either retool the
kinect to disallow the use by mathematica. Some other third party would have
to work similar to kinect for it to actually happen.

~~~
anigbrowl
That's true, but I doubt they will - and if they do, hordes of imitators will
appear. My _hunch_ (ie I have no evidence whatsoever for this) is that MS's
huffing and puffing over people's reverse engineering of the Kinect was little
more than posturing designed to increase viral interest. If they really wanted
to keep it limited to the Xbox they'd have forced a proprietary connector to
one of the memory expansion slots or such, rather than giving it USB 2 and
acting surprised when people tried plugging it into other devices.

Intentional or not, it's having a good launch - word is that it's flying off
shelves, and seems to have instant mass appeal. I was at an information
management technology conference a week ago, and guess which two booths were
the most crowded? The ones that were trading 3 minutes of sales pitching for a
go at _Dance Dance Revolution_ or whatever the Kinect version is called.
Incidentally, the other thing being used to bribe jaded conference-goers was
the prospect of winning an iPad every hour - there must have been 30
exhibitors using that one.

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drallison
Home edition (hobbiest, non-commercial): $295 Professional edition: $1095
(Windows, MAC, Linux) An amazing product, IMHO.

~~~
tzs
Professional is still $2500 for me. Someone on Reddit reported seeing the
$1095 price in Firefox and the $2500 price in Chrome.

~~~
Natsu
Is it just browser they discriminate on, or what? That's a heck of a discount.
Makes me wonder if I should do some experimenting to see how to get lower
prices...

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cschmidt
It looks like lots of nice new features. The statistics area looks greatly
improved. (It was kind of weak before, compared to R). You can import any of
the Wolfram|Alpha data sets, and directly manipulate them. I like the
financial charts, which were more or less impossible before. The C integration
might be useful. I'll also like the improved word processing, so you could
write a decent looking paper in MMa.

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yqiang
There's a great open source alternative to Mathematica called Sage:
<http://sagemath.org>. It's purpose is to offer the same sort of functionality
as many of the commercially available math programs but only using free and
open source tools.

