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by agoose77 1457 days ago
Could you elaborate on

> The front-end is just lightyears in front of Jupyter notebooks in just about every conceivable way.

I had the opposite experience, but it's a very broad statement and I suspect we took different interpretations of "front-end"
1 comments
kgwgk 1457 days ago
Under what interpretation of "front-end" would Mathematica's front-end be behind of Jupyter notebooks?
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agoose77 1457 days ago
Hah, answering a question with a question ;)

A few pain points for me:

- No Markdown support. Yes, there's rich input, but I find it more natural to write prose in a markup language rather than with a rich editor.

- Single "kernel" support. This isn't a criticism of Mathematica per-se: it doesn't care about other languages. But, it's nice to be able to use Jupyter Notebooks with C++, Python, etc.

- Limited UX w.r.t layout. JupyterLab lets me pin outputs, split the view, run a terminal alongside my notebook etc.

- Restricted ecosystem. This is a big one - it's not trivial to write an extension for Mathematica to extend its UX / rich output mechanism. With Jupyter, this is fairly trivial.

Don't get me wrong, they're different tools, and that's why I'm reluctant to engage with "X is better than Y" discussions. Mathematica is vastly unsuited to the kind of analysis / work that I do, whilst I'm sure the same is true of those who swear by Mathematica.

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kgwgk 1457 days ago
Ok.

If you like Jupyter more than Mathematica as a front-end you can use wolframscript

https://www.wolfram.com/wolframscript/

as a Jupyter kernel:

https://github.com/WolframResearch/WolframLanguageForJupyter

You can use it with the free (for non-production use) Wolfram Engine:

https://www.wolfram.com/engine/

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