I don't really like English from a linguistic point of view (as a non-native speaker). It's a hodgepodge of other languages and has so many exceptions, it's not very elegant. But it's so ubiquitous and useful that one basically has to know English today.
On the other hand, Latin is beautiful and pure. There's more rules, but very few exceptions. But unless you study catholic theology or something along those lines, it's basically useless.
Which one maps to Wolfram Language and which one to Python is probably obviously.
The problem though is that Wolfram is a walled garden. When you think about integrating it in an enterprise environment, you get hit by such high costs, it stops making sense. Imagine if they open sourced it, I feel like their products have so much utility, buried deep down Wolfram ecosystem and conventions.
Reimplementation in Rust: https://github.com/ad-si/Woxi
WLJS Notebook: https://wljs.io
VS Code extension: https://github.com/vanbaalon/wolfbook
[1] a personal perpetual license is only $400.
Many years back while in grad school I could not reproduce a result from a paper. Thankfully they had provided the data as public but not the code. I emailed the authors and got some matlab code back. My university didn't have a matlab subscription. Octave saved me there since the syntax is similar.
But with something like mathematica and the price of it you will never be able to have a wide verification of the result if the software is not free.
Also, a lot of things in industry gain traction first in academia (especially math tools). So unless academic traction is dealt with mathematica's headway in industry will remain limited. They are still a profitable company. So I'm guessing there are deep pocketed clients who purchase the tooling.
For example, when digging into GNU Octave you will find many of its libraries were built on peer reviewed legacy code provably reproducible with prior aerospace published works.
The problem with closed source academic programs isn't features or even quality, but rather one of traceable Metrology and scientific rigor. =3
https://www.statista.com/chart/4111/do-europeans-wash-their-...
This sounds like your average functional programming language. The Scicloj community is the first thing to come to mind (but I assume they don't do symbolic algebra/calculus like Mathematica does), but I don't know what you're specifically missing.
Its standard library is almost impossible to reproduce in its enterity
If those libraries were like regular code that got published to Github or something like that.. like pypi or npm or crates.io or whatever. And if mathematica had a lean standard library. It would be very feasible to implement a clone that's basically compatible
I mean. Depending on just wolfram rather than random open source contributors has benefits, for example it's more resistant to supply chain attacks. Indeed the npm model is not good. But, it is open, and that's what enabled for example deno and bun to have some compatibility with node
But a walled garden that costs $400 for personal use (we're ignoring yearly licensing, because f that noise) is utter nonsense, and the clearest sign you have no idea how to sell and then upsell products to users over the course of several years.
Claude Caude is much better at Mathematica than Wolfram's own AI assistant. I think they flat-out acknowledge the very limited abilities of Mathematica's AI assistant in this version 15 announcement.
The Wolfram AI assistant is so bad I unsubscribed from it. By the sounds of it, a basic AI assistant is offered included with subscriptions now. I feel it's borderline criminal they were charging for their hallucinatory AI assistant in the past.
But that's fine. Mathematica client supports openrouter as LLM provider anyway so we can use whatever we want.
Unfortunately they are extremely surface level in this release. It looks like there isn't even any ability to load/export MusicXML, kind of weird low level primitives and zero interesting higher level functions. Hopefully they keep iterating on it but I don't think it'll be useful for my workflow right now.
Reimplementation in Rust: https://github.com/ad-si/Woxi
WLJS Notebook: https://wljs.io
VS Code extension: https://github.com/vanbaalon/wolfbook
SJ recommended some of the UI bits of the notebook. Particularly the separators between cells.
Of course there is a whole constellation of more specialized things in certain fields, that has come a long way in the last 15 years. So people needing things like that no longer kludge things together in Mathematica.
People joining my company from academia usually know Mathematica along with Python or R.
When we tell them we don’t use Mathematica they are sometimes initially concerned. They are typically quite opinionated and I have yet to hear an employee complain about no longer having access to Mathematica. Or SPSS, SAS, or MiniTab for that matter.