TLDR: Check this instead: <a href="http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/new-in-8/" rel="nofollow">http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/new-in-8/</a><p>The signal-to-noise ratio of that article is incredible low. What did I get out of the post?<p>- You can now type wolframalpha-style in mathematica.<p>- You now have over 3000 built-in functions (i.e., too many to remember ;)<p>The rest was just Wolfram telling the world in many different ways how great mathematica was/is/will be. Adjectives include: huge, important, dramatic, breakthrough, major, slow & lumbering (to describe others), etc. Hell, "great" is mentioned 6 times in the post!
Can anyone knowledgeable here speak about statistics offer some advice? I'm about to get into a project where, for the first time, I'll need to do some statistics processing and visualization. I haven't started on that component of it yet, and I'm free to choose whatever tool I want. Most of the rest of my project is in Haskell, but for the processing/visualization of statistics part, I was thinking of choosing R. Does anyone know how well Mathematica 8, or other commercial packages, stack up?
I'm a little disappointed by the opencl/cuda support.
I was hoping they'd be fully integrated with native algorithms in mma. Instead you need to change your code to call CUDAfft[] or whatnot. It should just choose the right fft to use, or supply a checkbox in preferences.
Eh. I'm a graduate student in mathematics, and it unless a problem is more or less trivial, it takes too long to force Mathematica to do what I mean.<p>Also I agree with a poster below: this press release is really low on the signal-to-noise.
Looks decent - I'll certainly try the demo. Though I'm no mathematician Mathematica is my favorite Maths playground software.<p>I'm curious about their implementation of NLP. This has enormous potential as a teaching tool - the biggest hurdle to getting more out of a package like this on first use is not knowing how to interact with it. However, I had had similar expectations of Alpha, and was greatly disappointed. though full of witty easter eggs and stocked with a rich variety of datasets, exploratory queries proved sadly frustrating.<p>Here's what I want to see in version 9 (laugh now, realize I'm right later): Kinect interaction. Perhaps unwittingly, Microsoft have just launched the next great peripheral and it seems intuitively popular with the public in a way I haven't seen for years and years. Now, imagine you've generated or imported a mathematically-specified 3d object in M., and imagine it inside a bounding box with handles on the vertices and local minima/maxima. Multi-point, multi-d interactivity would be both absorbing for students and potentially extremely productive for professionals, without requiring significant retooling of the core.
It looks like lots of nice new features. The statistics area looks greatly improved. (It was kind of weak before, compared to R). You can import any of the Wolfram|Alpha data sets, and directly manipulate them. I like the financial charts, which were more or less impossible before. The C integration might be useful. I'll also like the improved word processing, so you could write a decent looking paper in MMa.
There's a great open source alternative to Mathematica called Sage: <a href="http://sagemath.org" rel="nofollow">http://sagemath.org</a>. It's purpose is to offer the same sort of functionality as many of the commercially available math programs but only using free and open source tools.