
Version 11 of Mathematica - NoXReX
http://blog.wolfram.com/2016/08/08/today-we-launch-version-11/
======
delish
I recommend that Stephen Wolfram skeptics read this press release. I was
surprised by language-level support for 3D printing:

    
    
        In Version 11 it’s finally realistic to take any 3D plot, and just 3D print it. 
    

I didn't know that I wanted this until I saw it. Generally I prefer small,
simple languages. But Mathematica is my favorite large language.

I'm also happy that, even though Mathematica 11 introduces flashy features
like 3D printing support and a Logo-derivative, it also includes improved
support for calculus. Is there anyone else like Wolfram, i.e. a math-person
who presides over a very-pragmatic, very-large programming language? That's
not a rhetorical question.

A question for Mathematica-folk: does Mathematica have support for direct
manipulation like Toby Schachman's works?[] I find direct manipulation more
pleasant than typing characters.

[] [http://tobyschachman.com/](http://tobyschachman.com/)

~~~
pmiller2
> Generally I prefer small, simple languages.

I would argue that MMA is a small language hiding behind a gigantic, domain-
specific library.

~~~
quantumhobbit
It helps that the huge library has some of the best documentation I've ever
encountered.

~~~
backslash_16
If a massive standard library, or really any library, doesn't have good
documentation how do you find out about it?

In some statically typed languages like C# and Java you can use an IDE's
object or interface explorer to see what the classes, methods, and properties
of a class lib are. If that's missing do you have to use introspection or
reflection? In a REPL if the language has one?

Is it assumed a compiled language will be statically typed (though that
doesn't have to be true) and if it's not the source code will come with any
library so examining it is easy?

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perlgeek
Somehow the mixing of computation and data sources makes me uneasy.

In classical Mathematica, you could be pretty sure that computations with
future versions would give the same output. Now what happens when, for
example, the average size of an egg increases over time, and then with version
12 the data is updated, and suddenly your notebooks give different results
when you rerun them.

Also, where does the data come from? Can you use it as a base for scientific
publications?

~~~
hooloovoo_zoo
An even worse problem is that you occasionally lose support for some data
entirely. A while back I was playing with some historical stock data and when
I went to run the notebook again some time later Mathematica no longer had
data for the tickers I was trying to lookup.

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mathattack
An open question independent of the author: What do people use Mathematica for
that can't be done in R, SAS, Matlab, SPSS or Python libraries.

Is it a great innovation that other tools have caught up with, or is it still
getting a lot of use at the bleeding edge?

~~~
coldtea
> _An open question independent of the author: What do people use Mathematica
> for that can 't be done in R, SAS, Matlab, SPSS or Python libraries._

All those don't offer a seamless environment, that's hassle free, easy to
setup, with commercial support, a great GUI, great documentation and works
across so many science domains and with different approaches.

So, the question is quite (but not that severely) like "what people do with
excavators that you can't do with spades".

The answer is, nothing much, except tons.

~~~
williamstein
We (see [https://cloud.sagemath.com](https://cloud.sagemath.com)) and others
(e.g., [https://www.continuum.io/](https://www.continuum.io/)) do offer
commercial support for Python (etc.) and an easy to setup environment. Of
course, Matlab is also commercially supported by Mathworks, and it seems that
R is now commercially supported by Microsoft ([https://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/cloud-platform/r-server](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/cloud-
platform/r-server)).

[Edit: added Microsoft]

~~~
gone35
_and an easy to setup environment._

Hardly so[1] --especially for general/non-technical users.

[1]
[http://doc.sagemath.org/pdf/en/installation/installation.pdf](http://doc.sagemath.org/pdf/en/installation/installation.pdf)

~~~
wbhart
I think he's referring to commercial support for a Python environment at
cloud.sagemath.com, for which there is zero setup. Just go to the link
provided. SageMath is also available there with zero setup. You don't need the
Sage installation manual to use it there.

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sciyoshi
This is really exciting stuff. Mathematica is by far my favorite environment
for doing data exploration and mathematics, and although there is a learning
curve, the features of the language itself (pattern matching, symbolic
manipulation) are extremely powerful. The quality and depth of Mathematica's
documentation are excellent, and with these notebook interface changes things
are bound to become even easier. Jupyter + tensorflow/scikitlearn comes close
nowadays for machine learning, but I love having access to consistent data
sets from within the environment.

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skolos
It now has

 _data on Pokémon and lots of other useful things_

I love this - will be able to show off my kids a tool that I use all the time
for work.

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chm
I'm a Mathematica customer for life. I have been using it for the last 6
years, and I've built only one "big" project in it. I don't like it for
"software development", but any time I want to hack something together, or do
some calculation, whatever the context, I open a Mathematica notebook. The
standard library is astounding, and you're up to speed in no time.

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verandaguy
Great news. I'm particularly excited to see that they're implementing more
thorough builtins for working with ANNs and other ML abstractions.

~~~
taliesinb
If you want to know more about the neural network stuff specifically there is
a gallery of marketing examples at [http://www.wolfram.com/language/11/neural-
networks/?product=...](http://www.wolfram.com/language/11/neural-
networks/?product=mathematica) and quite a few examples at
[http://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/NetTrain.html](http://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/NetTrain.html)
(look under Applications near the bottom of the page).

The current selection of layers is biased a bit towards vision, but my
colleague and I are working on recurrent networks as we speak, which will
unlock networks that operate on text, audio, and other data of a sequential or
temporal character. Hopefully that will land in a few months with 11.1.

~~~
verandaguy
>other data of a sequential or temporal character

Awesome! Good to hear that there will be abstractions for general data
processing too, and not just audio/video/text.

reference.wolfram.com seems to be down as I write this, but I'll check back in
a few hours.

If you're working on Mathematica as your comment implies, thanks for your
contributions. It's a wonderful piece of software (even if closed source)!

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rcarmo
Mathematica is squarely on my "stuff I'd buy if I had cash to spare" category.
I use Jupyter on a daily basis for a few different languages and it's
improving steadily every month, but I kind of wish I was using Mathematica
instead most of the time. As it is, I poke at it occasionally on a Raspberry
Pi (which is now mostly fast enough) and wonder wistfully what it would be
like to run on an i7 (or, rather, a cluster of i7 boxes...)

It does annoy me a bit that it's becoming a mix of a client environment and an
online service, but Alpha does have its use.

Not really sure what to make of the Pokémon stuff, though :)

~~~
sbmassey
A home edition without support is $95, for the record

Correction: that is the upgrade price, my mistake

~~~
phonon
That's the upgrade price. The home version is $295 (for the record.)

[https://www.wolfram.com/mathematica-home-
edition/](https://www.wolfram.com/mathematica-home-edition/)

~~~
sbmassey
Oh ok, sorry

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protomyth
I do wonder if they have ever thought of building a Mathematica Machine like
the old Lisp and Smalltalk machines?

~~~
jlarocco
I doubt it. I think the big take away lesson from the language specific
machines was that it's not worth it. _LOTS_ of money is spent on the R&D that
goes into making x86, ARM, etc. faster and better each iteration, and without
the economies of scale that come with a huge install base, it's basically just
a money pit. Even if a dedicated Mathematica CPU was faster now, the x86
version will be faster in a few years anyway.

It might make sense one day when when processor improvements level off even
more than they already have.

On the other hand, it might be a neat idea to OEM a high end x86 system and
sell it as a purpose built "mathematica machine," with Mathematica pre-
installed, the best supported GPU, optimal RAM and CPU, etc.

~~~
sp332
A lot of Mathematica is already written in Mathematica. When Apple switched
Macs to Intel CPUs, they included Mathematica as a flagship program, and flew
their engineers out to do a port in secret. One engineer said the hardest part
of the port was deciding what to do with the rest of the weekend.

~~~
SSLy
source?

~~~
belazeebub
WWDC 2005:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcfGsOKXO5M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcfGsOKXO5M)

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abc_lisper
I wonder if any of you use it recreationally, at home. Is it worth buying,
assuming you have some spare cash?

~~~
E6300
No, it's not. Maybe for USD 50, but 300 is far too much when Maxima solves
most of the same problems.

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kylehotchkiss
Wish it wasn't so pricy! But I get why. Wolfram alpha's site answers so many
of my questions.

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Aardwolf
Would have been great if this version fixed the syntax.

Square brackets for function arguments makes no sense, neither mathematically,
nor programming language wise :)

Same for Sin requiring a capital letter, and curly braces instead of square
brackets for matrices

~~~
bordercases
Square brackets – one keypress. Curly brackets – two keypresses, shift and the
other bracket key.

Result: reserved key for brackets, instead of mixing brackets and numbers
while making the only kind of bracket an entire key more to get to.

Evaluation: it's clean and efficient.

~~~
pjmlp
On most European keyboards brackets are both two keypresses.

