I love Rust for mathematical and scientific tasks (I am building the structural bio crate infrastructure), and I love Mathematica and have a personal sub. I should be the audience, but... What makes Mathematica great, IMO, is the polish and overall experience created by consistent work with applications in mind over decades. So, I look at this project with skepticism regarding its utility.
Sure, but you've got to start somewhere! And with the amount of progress I was able to make in just a few weeks, I'm very optimistic that the polish will come sooner rather than later.
Based on the list of contributors to your project, I am not sure this starting location is optimally suited to the task of building a foundation for polished, reliable, expandable software.
I have no dog in this fight, but simply claiming a count of tests get you anything is like saying your code coverage is 100% - it sounds really good until you think about what 5000 unreviewed tests actually... do.
If I go by the contributor numbers on Github, I see Claude has committed something on the order of 300,000 lines of code. I don't think it's reasonable to review that much code, even in weeks worth of time.
I haven’t needed to do such a thing in a while, but my “rule” for explaining how unreasonable is to say “if I only glanced at each line of code for 1 second, without bothering to understand the details, it would take me 3 and a half full 24hr days non stop to simply look at”. So it’s definitely more than 1 work week because presumably other stuff is going to need to get done in that time too. Actually understanding it is going to be at least a multiple of that, and probably the multiple is ~30x.
It's a defense mechanism. I was guilty as charge as well initially. Suddenly most of your l33t skillz are trivialized and surpassed by an inhumane actor. It's a tough pill to swallow.
i'm curious if you intend to reimplement highly optimized numerical algorithms, symbolic algorithms, and so on, accumulated and tuned in mathematica since its 1988 release?
it's a huuuuuuuuge amount of technology in the standard library of mathematica, beyond the surface syntax and rewrite system, i mean.
I am not sure Octave ever had to put on that much polish. It just had to be decent enough to save $$$$ vs a Matlab license. If it can drop-in run the code that has been keeping the lab going for decades, good enough.
MathWorks offers a huge list of "toolboxes", domain specific extensions that cover a lot of features in each domain. Replacing Matlab isn't about the core language alone.
The price tags are wild for sure. But the sheer number of supported features is what makes them attractive. Cloning that completely is practically infeasable.
If you were using everything in the toolboxes, it would be absolutely worth it. As it is, you often need an additional toolbox for basic functionality and pay for everything in it.
I did my PhD with Octave. Sure, I did not have this nice convex optimization toolbox. But I had everything else I needed and did not need to wait because people arrived earlier in the lab and grabbed all floating licenses of, for instance, the communications toolbox.
However, I switched to Python during the last years.
The notebooks were THE thing of Mathematica, at least to me.
12 years ago, as I was finishing my PhD in quantum optics, I wanted to migrate to the stack used in industry - and picked Python. Also, that way I was an early adopter of Jupyter Notebook, as it captured what was need + was open.
Now Mathematica notebooks (still remember, it is .nb) do not have the novelty factor. But they were the first to set a trend, which we now take for granted.
That said, I rarely use notebooks anymore. In the coding time, it is much easier to create scripts and ask to create a visualization in HTML.
Mathematica's notebooks are the only environment where I can do some computation to arrive at a symbolic expression. Copy the expression from the output cell into a new input cell. Then manipulate it by hand into the form I want. Then continue processing it further.
Also, symbolic expressions can be written nicely with actual superscripts and subscripts, and with non-latin characters.
(AFAIK, you can run Mathematica sessions in TeXmacs, get proper typesetting, and can copy/paste expressions for simplification by hand or using other CAS sessions in the same TeXmacs document).
I disagree, the language itself is one of the more elegant parts of the system, and enables a lot of the rest of the elegance.
From a purely programming language theory, it's pretty unique.
I once tried to find a language that had all the same properties, and I failed. The Factor language is probably the closest. But they are still pretty different.
The relevant programming paradigm is string/term rewriting, which is featured in other programming languages such as Pure. It seems to have few direct applications outside of symbolic computing itself, compilers and related fields such as PL theory. (Formal calculi and languages are often specified in PL theory as rewrite rules, even though the practical implementation may ultimately differ.)
First I believe there is no such thing as the Mathematica language, it's Wolframscript which is useful in a bunch of different applications. And second, if you don't have access to a $1000 / yr wolfram subscription, this would be the next best thing.
