[skolos]

I like Mathematica and use it regularly. But I did not see any benefits of using it over python as a tool that Claude Code can use. Every script it produced in wolfram was slower with worse answers than python. Wolfram people are really trying but so far the results are not very good.

[mr_mitm]

Back when I was using it, mathematica was unmatched in its ability to find integrals. Has python caught up there?

[currymj]

sympy is good enough for typical uses. the user interface is worse but that doesn't matter to Claude. I imagine if you have some really weird symbolic or numeric integrals, Mathematica may have some highly sophisticated algorithms where it would have an edge.

however, even this advantage is eaten away somewhat because the models themselves are decent at solving hard integrals.

[closeparen]

I like to think of Claude as enjoying himself more when working with good tools rather than bad ones. But metaphysics aside, tools that have the functions you would expect, by the names you would expect, with the behavior you would expect, do seem to be just as important when the users are LLMs.

[falcor84]

For numeric stuff, I've been playing recently with chebpy (a python implementation of matlab's chebfun), and am really impressed with it so far - https://github.com/chebpy/chebpy

[tptacek]

I've always sort of assumed the models were just making sympy scripts behind the scenes.

[cyanydeez]

Wheres Godel when you need him. A lot of this stuff is symbol shunting, which LLMs should be really good at.

[currymj]

sometimes you can see them do this and sometimes you can see they just work through the problem in the reasoning tokens without invoking python.

[galaxyLogic]

I don't think we should pick a winner. When it comes to mathematical answers the best would to pose the same query to all of them and if they all give the same result then our space-rocket is probably going in the right direction.

[bandrami]

It's symbolics capabilities are still really good, though in my totally subjective opinion not as good as Maxima's.

[ai-christianson]

What do you think the problem is?

[owyn]

I think the problem is just not enough training on that specific language because it's proprietary. Most useful Mathematica code is on someone's personal computer, not GitHub. They can build up a useful set of training data, some benchmarks, a contest for the AI companies to score high on, because they do love that kind of thing.

But for most internet applications (as opposed to "math" stuff) I would think Python is still a better language choice.