[bowsamic]

I'll believe it when I see it, because right now there is no alternative. I wrote a piece of physics software recently and sympy (and indeed python in general) was so lacking in features that I had to write half of the software as mathematica packages, half of it as python. I would have implemented those functions myself but they are actually extremely non-trivial and I wouldn't be surprised if just one of the basic functions I needed had many years of R&D and thousands of lines and edge cases.

Until there is an open source software that can match the raw symbolic power combined with the huge libraries nothing can touch it for a lot of people.

[sterlind]

ran into this myself just today, but with Symbolics.jl instead of SymPy. I just needed an algebra scratchpad, and Symbolics was.. barren. and uninviting. I thought of reaching for Mathematica but resorted to pencil and paper, like a barbarian.

same deal with solvers more generally. the coin-or stuff (e.g. Cbc) is slow and buggy, Cplex and Gurobi are far better but very expensive. where are the PhDs in this field? what are they building?

[logicchains]

>I just needed an algebra scratchpad, and Symbolics was.. barren. and uninviting. I thought of reaching for Mathematica but resorted to pencil and paper, like a barbarian.

Have you tried Maxima? It seems more ergonomic.

[anthk]

I use Maxima on a Atom N270 netbook. It works greatly, fast and usable. Gnuplot for plotting, and I'm done.

[bowsamic]

Sympy is good as a scratchpad I think. For my case I needed minimal state space realisations of MIMO transfer matrices. In mathematica this is just two functions. Implementing this in Python could take months

[sfriedr]

> I thought of reaching for Mathematica but resorted to pencil and paper, like a barbarian.

A very computer-science perspective with the obligatory dose of hubris.

Pencil and paper is continuing to serve a much older, much more consolidated discipline (mathematics) well for... ever since paper was invented.

[sterlind]

the barbarian bit was tongue-in-cheek. it's just that symbolic algebra is one of those old-school, classic use cases for computers, like playing chess or guiding missiles or scheduling routes. I enjoy those kinds of moments.

[catchclose8919]

...symbolic computation is a niche ...but Wolfram/Mathematics is also a very good general purpose language/tool.

It would be insane value for everyone if the symbolic niche could also be covered by a general purpose language...