
Stephen Wolfram Version 12 Launches Today (and It’s a Big Jump for Wolfram - based2
https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/16/version-12-launches-today-big-jump-for-wolfram-language-and-mathematica/
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sctb
Previously:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19674966](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19674966).

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sthatipamala
Maybe change the title to "Wolfram Language Version 12 Launches"?

This is not the 12th iteration of Stephen Wolfram, the human ;)

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ajross
I clicked on this thinking it was genuine satire about his ego, actually.

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sevensor
One thing that I find really compelling about Mathematica is that it's
quintessential Cathedral software -- mostly developed under one roof, with an
almost proverbially dominant centralizing vision. Compared to the Bazaar I'm
accustomed to (CTAN, CPAN, PyPI, crates.io, et cetera) all I could find for
Mathematica is this: [http://packagedata.net/](http://packagedata.net/). 212
packages. You don't need to go looking for gargoyles, grotesques or stained
glass, Mathematica has them all, and relics besides.

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bonoboTP
Based on the marketing and the visuals it seems like this really powerful and
cool thing, but somehow I don't know anyone using it, nor do I see it "in the
wild", e.g. blog posts playing with it, doing data science with it etc.

Much more so with scientific Python, Jupyter notebooks etc. I guess being
proprietary is quite a big limitation for its adoption.

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1f60c
...never mind the fact that it costs several hundreds of dollars per year,
even for personal use, while pretty much every computer ships with Python.

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jakeinspace
Anybody on HN using Wolfram/Mathematica at work? It seems like a massive tower
of math software (possibly larger than MATLAB even), but I've been a bit
daunted to ever get into it. I have no idea if it's usable for anything
outside of academic research.

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chrisseaton
I've seen people use it in industrial cryptography and finance. It's the kind
of app they open and fullscreen at the start of their day, and they don't
switch to any app until they finish.

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rcarmo
The Around[] support for uncertainty is... mind-blowing. I've used Mathematica
on and off over the years, and it never ceased to amaze me how _meaningful_
you could make your formulas, but this is pretty neat.

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T-R
Haskell has a few libraries that do this[1]. Not trying to one-up the article
or anything, just thought you might be interested to see that there are other
places where this is available, and that it's not even something that needs
full language support in some cases, just a library. Also similar - you can
pretty transparently model nondeterminism[2] and probability[3] on a
"promise"-like interface with just a library. Of course, whether or not
there's good documentation is another story.

[1] [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19598906/is-there-a-
valu...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19598906/is-there-a-value-with-
error-library-in-haskell) [2]
[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20638893/how-can-non-
det...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20638893/how-can-non-determinism-
be-modeled-with-a-list-monad) [3]
[http://wiki.haskell.org/Probabilistic_Functional_Programming](http://wiki.haskell.org/Probabilistic_Functional_Programming)

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rmbryan
Is there a proper summary somewhere? The "summary" from wolfram is 61k words.
I get that there's a lot in the update. Isn't summarizing a mass of complex
information well suited to some kind of mechanical processing?

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JonathonW
There are bullet points summarized by category here:
[http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/new-
in-12/](http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/new-in-12/)

and a comprehensive list of new features here:
[https://reference.wolfram.com/language/guide/SummaryOfNewFea...](https://reference.wolfram.com/language/guide/SummaryOfNewFeaturesIn12.html)

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idlewords
From the changelog:

* Fixed bug where program names everything after itself

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whitepoplar
true u need itself plus a nonce for the cellular automaton to work

