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

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.

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.

The AI assistant complaints track with what I see on my end. Any general model I throw Wolfram Language at does noticeably worse than it does on Python. That part isn't surprising. There just isn't much public Wolfram code to learn from next to the mountain of Python sitting on github. It keeps guessing function names that sound plausible but don't exist. Spent an afternoon last week fixing hallucinated options on an NDSolve call it gave me.

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

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.

symbolic music features are interesting! they should add chroma!

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

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.

I like the changes they’ve made to the backend in the AI era because now if you input “weight of 1 cup of sugar” into WolframAlpha it says 202 grams and if you put in “weight of 1 cup of sucrose” it says 376 grams.

  I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend it. - Harry Emerson Fosdick

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

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.

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

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