Is there a reasonably neutral comparison of Mathics vs Mathematica anywhere?<p>Based on an amazing showcase[1] Mathematica is right at the top of my list of languages to learn if it (and at least some of the surrounding tooling) ever becomes open source. I wonder how many of those examples would give useful results in Mathics, or what their equivalents would be.<p>[1] <a href="https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/44683/9570" rel="nofollow">https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/44683/9570</a>
Every time someone makes a "free mathematica", my first question is "can I write, and see, maths as actual maths instead of as programming statement?" and every time so far the answer has been "no". So... can I write, and see, maths as actual maths?
Related:<p><i>Mathics – A free, light-weight alternative to Mathematica</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19851934" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19851934</a> - May 2019 (83 comments)<p><i>Mathics: A free, light-weight alternative to Mathematica</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11459186" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11459186</a> - April 2016 (73 comments)<p><i>Mathics - A free, light-weight alternative to Mathematica</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5196551" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5196551</a> - Feb 2013 (86 comments)<p><i>Mathics - A free, light-weight alternative to Mathematica with support for Sage</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4066826" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4066826</a> - June 2012 (57 comments)
I'm never sure why projects try to claim themselves as a free alternative to Mathematica. For one, they never seem to reach anywhere near the polish and power of Mathematica. And secondly, is Mathematica really that expensive if you use it in your job/industry?<p>For hobbyists, Mathematica is free on a Raspberry Pi, which probably runs better than any alternative, and has a pretty reasonable price point if you buy the real thing for personal use.<p>For students/professors, Mathematica is basically already free at most major universities.
This looks really nice and people interested in mathematical computing should try it out. I certainly will.<p>Apparently many commenters here do not understand the word "alternative", which means "a thing that you can choose to do or have out of two or more possibilities", and instead take it as "equal in every respect".
This looks difficult to install. I can see there's a core command line module and a GUI in different projects. I don't see a homebrew incantation or macOS installer or anything like that. Looks like python dependency hell.
I’m a big, big fan of Wolfram Language - as a recreational mathematician and programmer, there is <i>nothing</i> else I would rather do my explorations with.<p>As always in these discussions, I expect many people will start complaining about how expensive Mathematica is, and how Stephen Wolfram is very shortsighted with his pricing, and how open sourcing it would truly unlock all the potential of the system.<p>And I seriously doubt this point of view. Open sourcing is not a magic dust that automatically makes everything better. While it works in some cases, it doesn’t work in others - and not having a competitive open source mathematical system is a prove of that.<p>Hiring people to develop and evolve complex algorithms, on work on improving the UI and making it work on three different OSes, or curate and maintain the knowledge library, takes a lot of effort. I’m actually surprised they don’t price it higher!<p>Disclaimer: And yes, I live in a developed country, so $250/year for a personal license is not a substantial cost for me. I’m sure that somewhat biases my position.
Here's a great one for Android as well.<p><a href="https://github.com/mkulesh/microMathematics" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mkulesh/microMathematics</a><p>These guys should collaborate.
could someone advertise mathematica to me? like, how powerful is it? i'm a mathematically trained dev / DE. i'd probably be most interested in exploring rabbit holes as i find them, plotting things, simulating something etc
I always find the same problem with all Mathematica clones (Mathics, Sage, wxMaxima).<p>Do they offer a .exe that I can install, then click on a button and start a program without any tinkering. Mathics and Sage no. wxMaxima yes. Although I always had the feeling that wxMaxima is more an alternative to Derive than Mathematica at this point.<p>Mathematica works because it is easy to deal with, no installing packages, libraries, libraries incompatible with others. You have Mathematica 9, you got all that Mathematica 9 supports. You send a notebook to someone else, they can execute the notebook if their mathematica version is equal or larger.<p>It is like saying that Latex is an alternative to word. No, they both make documents, but one is not an alternative to the other one.
> Documentation for the Mathics system is provided in the PDF format (download the PDF).<p>Seriously? I'm already tired of latex packages only being documented as PDF, but at least there's a technical reason. Here, this is just contempt for the users.
Mathematica has an army of mathematicians working on edge cases that only other mathematicians would care about. It's essentially impossible for any open source software to match what mathematica does.
I thought that all the fuzz about something being <i>close source / commercial aka overpriced</i> is not worth a hill of beans, because if it doesn't fit your ideals/wallet you just use what fits.<p>But no, there's always a discourse about how unfair, unethical, greedy etc the developers of <i>closed source / commercial aka overpriced</i> software are, which vividly displays that the actual sentiment in these complaints is pure and simple envy, towards better things that cost more, towards developers who make a living off their own projects and don't feel obliged to worship the ideals of open source, free as in beer, cheap as in dirt etc...
I don't get the idea of re-running mathmatica scripts. I haven't used it 20 years, but always saw it as an algebra system. There's no re-running. Once the math is done it's done. Proving (manually) the correctness of the result is usually easier than finding it. Feeding numbers into the equations can be done elsewhere.
Haven't we had scipy for ages? It is a real OS replacement for Mathematica. It can even run a lot of its scripts/code (sometimes with minor changes).<p>In fact reading the linked page it appears they "build on top of" scipy.