Launching Mathematica 10

This made me laugh:<p><a href="http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/new-in-10/key-value-associative-arrays/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wolfram.com&#x2F;mathematica&#x2F;new-in-10&#x2F;key-value-assoc...</a><p>Version 10 introduces fundamental new constructs called associations. They associate keys with values, allowing highly efficient lookup and updating, even with millions of elements. Associations provide generalizations of symbolically indexed lists, associative arrays, dictionaries, hashmaps, structs, and a variety of other powerful data structures.

I&#x27;m very impressed by this stuff--especially the new computational geometry features.<p>I&#x27;m just a little hesitant to do any meaningful work in such a closed ecosystem.

Here&#x27;s the list of what&#x27;s new since version 9 of Mathematica: <a href="http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/new-in-10/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wolfram.com&#x2F;mathematica&#x2F;new-in-10&#x2F;</a>

ZIPCodeData and many other geographic functions are missing and have badly mangled documentation. I assume something went wrong in an automated build process. This is on the Mac OSX release.<p>So far ZIPCodeData[], NeighborhoodData[] and MountainData[],BroadcastStationData[], MovieData[], BuildingData[], PersonData[] are all mangled.<p>Worse yet, URLFetch is broken also. Something bad happened, at least with the Mac release.<p>In[1]:= URLFetch[&quot;<a href="http://www.google.com/&quot;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;&quot;</a>]<p>General::unavail: ExportString is not available in this version of the Wolfram Language.<p>ImportString::string: First argument ExportString[{60, 33, 100, 111, 99, 116, 121, 112, 101, 32, 104, 116, 109, 108, 62, 60, 104, 116, 109, 108, 32, 105, 116, &lt;&lt;19757&gt;&gt;, 111, 100, 121, 62, 60, 47, 104, 116, 109, 108, 62}, &lt;&lt;2&gt;&gt;] is not a string.<p>Out[1]= ImportString[ExportString[{60, 33, 100, 111, 99, 116, 121, 112, 101,

This is an impressive release.<p>GeoGraphics is amazing example of the power of integration between domains. Built-in data about the world, with semantic integration into graphics as well as data analysis. This is way beyond what any existing mapping solution has delivered.<p>The geometry stuff is also amazing and very useful for generative design and &quot;making&quot;

I hate to be that guy, but I wish to share my opinion about closed source mathematical software.<p>There is no doubt that what Wolfram Research has done with Mathematica is amazing and tempting. It is a very complete and uniform engine, and can be very useful for very different kinds of mathematics.<p>However, Wolfram Research deliberately keeps their methods and source code closed. Note that this is more serious than just the &quot;Stallman-esque&quot; open-source-everything philosophy. Wolfram insists that users do not need to know implementation details of their methods. This is plainly in their documentation. You can see the uncompelling argument from Wolfram here [6]. The gist of the argument is that interfaces matter, not implementations.<p>I strongly argue that users, especially mathematicians and engineers, should care about the internals of mathematical software, especially when it&#x27;s being used, even in a utilitarian fashion, for research and engineering.<p>Not only this, but Wolfram has litigated against his own employees for publishing mathematical proofs about cellular automata. Information about this lawsuit is sparse, but evidence of it can be seen in [0]. More information can be found here [1].<p>Unfortunately most responses to the above from users of Mathematica is &quot;well I just use Mathematica as a calculator, nothing serious&quot; or &quot;I wouldn&#x27;t look at the source code anyway, so what gives?&quot; It&#x27;s an unfortunate response, and I don&#x27;t have a technical rebuttal, but a moral one, which many don&#x27;t want to hear.<p>It pains me to see the technical reliance on Mathematica (and other software such as MATLAB) in professional mathematicians, scientists, and engineers. It reminds me of an addictive drug; one of the best hackers I know does their work completely in Mathematica, and can no longer work without it.<p>As is the case with a lot of closed source, proprietary software, there aren&#x27;t a ton of good alternatives. There is a plethora of logistical issues with existing computer algebra systems, but I nonetheless recommend them. Sage [2] is a continuously growing system based on Python which has backing from a lot of mathematicians. They are continually improving it. There&#x27;s also Maxima [3]. None of these has quite an extensive array of functionality and graphical capabilities as Mathematica.<p>I (and others) have written more about this issue more extensively here [4] for those interested. This is an extension on the article written by Jordi G. Hermoso [5].<p>If you took the time to read this, thanks.<p>[0] <a href="https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/theory-edge/conversations/messages/5828" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;groups.yahoo.com&#x2F;neo&#x2F;groups&#x2F;theory-edge&#x2F;conversation...</a><p>[1] <a href="http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu&#x2F;~crshalizi&#x2F;reviews&#x2F;wolfra...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.sagemath.org/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sagemath.org&#x2F;</a><p>[3] <a href="http://andrejv.github.io/wxmaxima/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;andrejv.github.io&#x2F;wxmaxima&#x2F;</a><p>[4] <a href="http://symbo1ics.com/blog/?p=69" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;symbo1ics.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;?p=69</a><p>[5] <a href="http://www.symbo1ics.com/files/jordi.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.symbo1ics.com&#x2F;files&#x2F;jordi.pdf</a><p>[6] <a href="http://reference.wolfram.com/language/tutorial/WhyYouDoNotUsuallyNeedToKnowAboutInternals.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;reference.wolfram.com&#x2F;language&#x2F;tutorial&#x2F;WhyYouDoNotUs...</a>

Interesting features, but I feel like it&#x27;s a lost cause, as it&#x27;s not worth investing in a proprietary platform.

Does anyone know if Mathematica 10 is retina-ready for Mac yet? This may seem petty to some, but when you do a lot of data visualisation, it really does matter.<p>As an aside, I&#x27;ve been using IPython Notebooks a lot over Mathematica over the past year and have generally been really happy with the change – not least because I know I won&#x27;t be locked out of my notebooks if I can&#x27;t afford a Mathematica license in future! That all said, I recently revisited a Mathematica notebook I&#x27;d made in the past, and it reminded me why I started using it in the first place. It really is a great piece of software: great libraries, great performance, generally a pleasure to use.

We&#x27;ll see if they fixed the proxy so it can get through our corporate firewall, otherwise the alpha integration is useless. No other programs have a problem except Mathematica.

I like to dump on Wolfram as much as anybody else, but tbh, these <i>really</i> are nice looking visualizations backed with a nice set of general purpose tooling.

£2050+VAT = yowsers.