Wolfram Mathematica

Mike Honeychurch

12:01 AM

The fastest growing program seems to be MathCAD -- reason: engineering market

And SPSS seems to be kicking arse since IBM bought it.

Rojo

12:57 AM

A friend of mine and coworker uses MathCAD

We are doing something together these days, in MMA and he already wants me to teach him

He's an engineer :)

Mike Honeychurch

ever since it was purchased by a public company (PTC) in 2006 its revenues have grown rapidly -- even though it seems to have had a lot of development hiccups along the way. Ditto IBM and SPSS. It shows how much a company with established large distribution channels can add to a product.

I ported 90-100 pages of MathCAD code to Mma for a project last year. I prefer Mma of course but can see why some people like the simplicity of MathCAD.

...and if you show your friend the latest attempt at units in Mma he will be rolling on the floor laughing.

I already knew that mathCAD did units well but what surprised me on that project was how well it did subscripted variables. None of the hoops that you have to jump through in Mma to get things to work smoothly.

Rojo

Nice

I already told him the undo thing, and he didn't laugh

What's the sequence of colors Plot and friends use to color successive curves when you put them in lists?

Mike Honeychurch

When you are talking to your mathCAD friend get him to show you: 1. units; 2. subscripted variables; 3. Excel importing/"spreadsheet" embedding. On the other hand the linear top down "dynamics" in mathCAD are a bit of a joke.

colours: you mean ColorData[1,"ColourList"]

Rojo

1:13 AM

That's right, thanks

I'll ask him tomorrow

Mike Honeychurch

I'd imagine that the ability to change the value of something dynamically anywhere in the notebook would appeal to a mathCAD user.

halirutan

3:40 AM

Does someone know whether the this article in this very old issue of TMJ can be accessed somehow? Maybe for free? We have premier support here. Even if I wanted to buy it, I somehow cannot add it to chart.

OK, I'm off for today. Later all.

rm -rf

4:06 AM

@halirutan It says to call for the price

Rojo

6:28 AM

SymmetricMatrixQ doesn't seem to work properly for StructuredArray

SymmetricMatrixQ[Array[x, {4, 4}]~Symmetrize~Symmetric[{1, 2}]] gives false, but

SymmetricMatrixQ[
Array[x, {4, 4}]~Symmetrize~Symmetric[{1, 2}] // Normal] gives true

Nasser M. Abbasi

7:18 AM

@halirutan the MMA Journals are on-line, here mathematica-journal.com/issue/v5i3

Rojo

7:47 AM

How does one insert a "slide break"? Page breaks seem to break between slides but the slide counter still shows "Slide 0 of 0"

Nasser M. Abbasi

and click on the download electronic supplement

halirutan

8:52 AM

@rm-rf Yes, I've clicked that but it ends in /dev/null.

@NasserM.Abbasi Yes, I have seen and clicked this too. Unfortunately, it is really only the supplements meaning only the packages and the notebooks. The article-columns are not included.

halirutan

9:25 AM

@Rojo One way is: Palettes -> Slide Show -> Insert new Slide Template

Nasser M. Abbasi

@halirutan, OK. I think WRI should make the whole journals on-line, not just the code. btw, this specific one, has code by Wagner there in the supllement, with some tricks in it. I wondered when I looked at this now if any still applies to V9. Some relate to change the line thickness of a plot and other cool stuff. I wonder what other hidden cool things are buried in these journals :)

halirutan

@NasserM.Abbasi Graphics and stuff changes. I'm always most excited about finding some new tricks in the core language which hasn't change that much.

Nasser M. Abbasi

10:04 AM

@halirutan, I think Mathematica is just way too complex to try to reason what some code will do by just looking at it. I find myself trying things to see if they will do what I want or not. When I program in other languages, I could always sort of figure what a piece of code will do when run. I think you guys who are experts in mathematica must have an IQ over 200 ;)

(depending on the code piece ofcourse, but I am speaking in general here)

Nasser M. Abbasi

10:23 AM

I am making a small demo, which you think of these 2 looks better, for the table shown there. The one with lines in between each row, or the one without?

halirutan

10:39 AM

@NasserM.Abbasi Ew.. There's one thing I don't have and this in IQ even near 200.

Rojo

10:51 AM

@halirutan Thanks!

@halirutan You got an IQ around 500 then?

halirutan

@Rojo wrong direction..

Oleksandr R.

@halirutan my feeling is that this is going to be very difficult to get hold of. It's possible that they still have the notebooks (I bet Wolfram has them in his personal archive but it will probably be impossible to obtain it from him). Perhaps if the notebooks are on some dusty floppy disk a WRI employee will be kind enough to post them on the website. Or perhaps to scan in the printed journals from their archive.

halirutan

11:20 AM

@OleksandrR. Yes, I was assuming, that they maybe don't have pdf's of it.

Maybe I should ask Todd directly.

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