
Which Is Closer: Local Beer or Local Whiskey? - lelf
http://blog.wolfram.com/2014/08/19/which-is-closer-local-beer-or-local-whiskey/
======
lumpypua
Around "In[115]" I became convinced that the wolfram blogging team has a meth
problem.

I'm always blown away by the wolfram blog visualizations and variety of data
sources, as well as the occasional mathematical gems they drop! But seriously,
don't do meth.

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zzleeper
In[115] is the reason for why Mathematica never clicked with me.. I'm not
smart enough to read that big block and write it, much less debug it.

~~~
Smaug123
It's a lot easier to write Mathematica than it is to read it. I've come up
with some retrospectively-horrific functions that were intuitively easy to
write - just keep piling on the functions, really. It's like the standard
mistake when children learn maths of writing "If x=-1, then x^2+2x+1 = (x+1)^2
+ 5 = 5" when they mean "x^2+2x+1 = (x+1)^2; then (x+1)^2 + 5 = 5":
Mathematica makes it very easy to write in a completely unreadable stream of
consciousness.

~~~
snicker
An ability to switch back and forth to a sort of "graph" view would be
tremendously helpful, as most people tend to have a better ability to process
visual information rather than a stream of text

~~~
cschmidt
You can't use it as an input form, but you can view a nice tree of your
expression automatically.

TreeForm[ x^2 + 2 x + 1 == (x + 1)^2]

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lutusp
This example may not actually demonstrate what its originators may think. It's
possible they think it shows that Mathematica can solve virtually any problem,
however esoteric. In fact, it shows that Mathematica can be a hacker's dream
world, creating solutions so complex that readers are left in awe of their
sheer irreproducibility.

Concisely, the example says, "See what you can do with Mathematica if you're
us?"

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judk
This is my reqctioe to every Mathematica blog post.

They nerd to write posts that walk through how a beginner could learn to do
this stuff without a 15-year career at Mathematica, or it's all sizzle and no
steak.

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devilsdounut
I like Mathematica... while their magic functions don't exactly work for much
outside of their demo's, it gives good fodder for open source projects to
eventually borrow from. IPython would not be where it is right now with its
killer notebook interface and interactive plots if it were not for them
borrowing some key ideas from Mathematica.

~~~
lutusp
> while their magic functions don't exactly work for much outside of their
> demo's ...

I write and solve a lot of differential equations, and of the choices
available to me, Mathematica solves more and is easier to use -- compared to
the alternatives Sage and IPython. But it's way expensive compared to Sage and
IPython, the latter two of which are free.

> IPython would not be where it is right now with its killer notebook
> interface and interactive plots if it were not for them borrowing some key
> ideas from Mathematica.

Don't forget Sage. Sage was modeled after Mathematica (but open-source and
collaborative), IPython was modeled after Sage (but much more lightweight).

Sage is huge and getting larger, lots of specialized code for various esoteric
mathematical fields, IPython has a smaller footprint and is in some ways
easier to use.

~~~
rz2k
I believe that Sage was modeled after Magma, which isn't important, but I
highly recommend this long blog post by William Stein[1] talking about his
motivations, the problem of basing academic work on closed source software,
and in the case of Magma, the potential politics of even being _able_ to get
the software.

[1] [http://sagemath.blogspot.com/2009/12/mathematical-
software-a...](http://sagemath.blogspot.com/2009/12/mathematical-software-and-
me-very.html)

~~~
lutusp
I agree, I've read that piece, it's very worthwhile, especially with regard to
the issue of being able to publish the mathematical methods built into common
math environments.

Oh -- my Sage tutorial: [http://arachnoid.com/sage](http://arachnoid.com/sage)

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bussiere
I am only using wolfram for their api and source of data, i've don't used too
much of their programming langage.

But only the data source is enough for me to give them money and support them
...

And their financials tools looks very interesting.

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thearn4
Have you had any concerns yet about data provenance? Granted, I've only done
queries right on Wolfram Alpha itself (and not with an api), but figuring out
precisely where the original source data came from is sometimes pretty hit-or-
miss.

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bussiere
not really i could ask them an i will.

thks for the comment

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im3w1l
This is incredibly cool.

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th0ma5
Must be nice to live in the cognitive dissonance where you think your fragile,
kludgey, application specific solutions are somehow stabile, well designed,
universal tools.

~~~
ctb9
Buried under the shitty attitude, there is actually a useful comment here.

Remember HN is the sum of it's parts. Be a postitive part.

