Wolfram Language and Mathematica Version 15, AI Assistant, Symbolic Music, More

Lucasoato

I’ve used Mathematica at university, it’s so great! Creating fractals, animations and so on is so easy and intuitive. The problem though is that Wolfram is a walled garden. When you think about integrating it in an enterprise environment, you get hit by such high costs, it stops making sense. Imagine if they open sourced it, I feel like their products have so much utility, buried deep down Wolfram ecosystem and conventions.

stblack

I'm a huge fan of Mathematica; I've been a subscriber for many years. There's much to love about the product, but its AI assistant isn't among them. Claude Caude is much better at Mathematica than Wolfram's own AI assistant. I think they flat-out acknowledge the very limited abilities of Mathematica's AI assistant in this version 15 announcement. The Wolfram AI assistant is so bad I unsubscribed from it. By the sounds of it, a basic AI assistant is offered included with subscriptions now. I feel it's borderline criminal they were charging for their hallucinatory AI assistant in the past.

SilverElfin

Does anyone use this outside of college classes? It looks so great in these demos but I never hear of companies using it.

Vaslo

I remember using it in my college days in the 90s. People joining my company from academia usually know Mathematica along with Python or R. When we tell them we don’t use Mathematica they are sometimes initially concerned. They are typically quite opinionated and I have yet to hear an employee complain about no longer having access to Mathematica. Or SPSS, SAS, or MiniTab for that matter.

a-dub

symbolic music features are interesting! they should add chroma!

prenx4x

Hissab - https://hissab.io is a Free and opensource alternative to Wolfram

UltraSane

The mathematica solve function is a lot of fun to use.

everyone

I just learned that Stephen Wolfram himself is a bit of a crank apparently. https://youtu.be/fO9iRDPXvT4?si=CbCjBtOSM5JhgYUF

steve1977

I always compare the difference between Mathematica/Wolfram Language and Python to the difference between Classical Latin and English. I don't really like English from a linguistic point of view (as a non-native speaker). It's a hodgepodge of other languages and has so many exceptions, it's not very elegant. But it's so ubiquitous and useful that one basically has to know English today. On the other hand, Latin is beautiful and pure. There's more rules, but very few exceptions. But unless you study catholic theology or something along those lines, it's basically useless. Which one maps to Wolfram Language and which one to Python is probably obviously.

lutusp

If Stephen Wolfram really wanted wide adoption of Wolfram Language, he would give it an open-source license and release its source. As things stand it's an expensive walled garden whose costs outweigh its advantages. A quote from the linked article: " ...year after year building an ever taller tower of ideas and technology ..." That's an accurate description of the Wolfram empire -- every year it becomes a more expensive, less accessible, vertical tower. Meanwhile, people intent on disseminating useful knowledge do so by growing horizontally -- Python, Linux, many others, all open-source. Historical figures would be astonished at what Wolfram is trying to do -- they would say, "Wait ... you can't patent mathematics!" No, but you can try.