[szhorvat]

"I’m a representative sample of my fellow software engineers"

I'm a bit puzzled about how strongly you seem to be feeling about this topic. Given your comments, you seem to be quite far from the target audience of Mathematica. It's not for software engineers. Most productive work done with Mathematica is not "building software" ...

But given all this hostility, have you downloaded it, and have you tried it? Or is all this just philosophical (i.e. the least interesting) criticism? There seems to be no experience backing your comments.

[reikonomusha]

I do computer mathematics. I’m the author of a computational group theory package [2], and my day job is in quantum mechanics and quantum computation, but in that I’m building packages in a software engineering capacity. The algebra gets pretty gnarly. Check out a recent paper, which includes both a math [0] and SW [1] component. Perhaps because of this I’m unusually representative of the intersection between math and software.

I hope folks aren’t finding my comments hostile. I have used the Mathematica product before in their GUI and at the command line, and some of my colleagues use it for various calculation tasks. I’ve opted to stick to open source alternatives like Sage, wxMaxima, GAP, and Axiom/Fricas.

The engine doesn’t give you a license to Mathematica, so I don’t presume the target audience is the collection of folks who want to do differential equations with plots. The article emphasizes lots of software things (languages, integrations, etc.), so actually I do believe they’re targeting software engineers.

You should note that I have not criticized their features, but rather restrictions on the use of the product in the first place . Maybe that would be interesting to read, but instead I have commented on the leading question in Wolfram’s article. I have not and will not download their Wolfram engine in its current state though for the reasons I’ve outlined. Do recall that using it means I’m bound to a legal contract, and that’s not one I’m willing to engage with.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.10541

[1] https://github.com/rigetti/quilc/blob/master/src/compilers/a...

[2] https://github.com/stylewarning/cl-permutation

[ycombinete]

I think people are confusing your certainty with hostility. I've read all of your follow up responses in this thread, and don't see any kind of hostility. What I am seeing is a lot of ad hominem hostility being directed at you as little prefaces to people's arguments.

[iamwil]

No, your comments have been rather measured, and I applaud you for it.

[mark_l_watson]

cL-permutations looks nice!

As an old Lisp programmer, it makes me feel good seeing CL applications.

I broadly agree with your points in this conversation but I am downloading the Engine right now. I also did a ten day free trial of Mathematica recently. I have a little time to spare to kick the tires.

BTW, in the same way that Keras has functionality to download some standard data sets and cache them locally, I would like to see more CL projects do the same. Julia has a few such packages. Having easy to access data is a selling point for Wolfram Language.

[marmada]

Not sure how the parent comment is hostile. They aren't critiquing the system itself, they are critiquing its method of distribution.

As such, this comment:

>But given all this hostility, have you downloaded it, and have you tried it? Or is all this just philosophical (i.e. the least interesting) criticism? There seems to be no experience backing your comments.

does not seem to apply