@versbeia I believe that the when the founding fathers wrote "if your motivation is “I would like others to explain ______ to me”, then you are probably OK" they didn't mean the ______ to mean entire programs, but more syntaxes, functions, constructions etc. Allowing entire programs in this way would be the start of the slippery slope. I'm sure it would be possible to provide a nice answer, in fact I was already doing that, but I realized that may be not the best way to handle this question.
What would happen with this site if 9 out of 10 questions consisted of " I found this program on the Internet, please explain"?
@SjoerdCdeVries Yes, and I agree with you. I probably wasn't clear this morning, but I was just noting that the letter of the FAQ would not have suggested that this question was off-topic. I agree that having a lot of such questions would destroy the site even faster than no questions would. The solution would to modify the FAQ, not answer such questions.
Speaking of which, it is awful quiet on the New Questions page.
@acl We should revisit the meta thread about whether SystemModeler should be on topic... Personally, I don't think it should (the only thing it has to do with Mathematica is that it has an interface to it---but it doesn't require Mathematica).
I predict (or at least would like to see) some questions will be raised about the new platform for general symbolic modelling. A lot of us use Mathematica for modelling simple or complex systems, and this new software might make it easier to develop such models. So, should questions related to Sy...
@Verbeia I don't see what modification is necessary; the only way to misinterpret the FAQ is to ignore everything in it except the single sentence "if your motivation is “I would like others to explain ______ to me”, then you are probably OK"
in any case I doubt any of the questions triggering this discussion where posted by people who read the FAQ and then said "aha! this is the right place to ask!" (which does not mean the FAQ should be misleading, of course, I just think it is not)
@acl I agree, I just can see how someone could misread it. I agree that question should be closed. But perhaps the FAQ could be tweaked just to be sure.
@IstvánZachar same computer? same configuration? fresh Mathematica kernel?
@IstvánZachar Do you have antialiasing in 3D graphics? DensityPlot is also rendered on the GPU. If you don't have antialiasing in 3D, can you turn it on fromt he preferences (if your current machine supports it)?
@Verbeia Actually, I can't remember if I had it before or not...
@Szabolcs That explains. So if I don't have 3D AA (which I don't have), then I can't have DensityPlot AA neither?
My machine does not support 3D AA, nothing happens when I move the slider under options.
It is annoying that a non-AA DensityPlot cannot be combined with any AA-ed graphics either via Epilog, Texture or Show, as then the whole thing will be non-AA.
I'm not certain these should be merged. If they are, I feel that pattern-matching should be the master.
It is used preferentially: 54 versus 15 questions at this time
It is not easily confused with design patterns
pattern-matching is at the heart of Mathematica; not having such a tag seems wro...
@MrWizard I came to the same conclusion. I've removed HoldAll, and am going to try to find a case where the output is something that I don't expect.
@MrWizard Sure, I have some time for tags now
@MrWizard Oh, I see your point, I totally agree with you. I was a bit hasty commenting on Sjoerd's answer, and did not include that I would prefer pattern-matching over patterns. Same reasons as you use.
@IstvánZachar yeah, it could be part of a blog post. Btw, I'm dropping the tetris
in favour of letris
Humm, people could help there
Given a matrix of characters and spaces that represent "no character", and a list of positions in that matrix
I would need an efficient function that finds all the words that can be formed in straight lines or diagonals (left-right, top-bottom), that contain letters in those positions, and their starting and ending position in the matrix
given a list of allowed words, of course, longer than 1 character long
This question is inspired by a StackOverflow question that I decided to solve using Mathematica. In addition to Mathematica, I thought I'd use some of the new version's graph-related functionality, which I've never really explored in the past. It seemd like a natural fit, but the further I got in...
@Rojo actually I thought you'd had that in mind when you suggested Letris. Either way, the performance of Leonid's solution will definitely come in useful here.
Well, perhaps. I think you're at least as good as I am though. :) Plus, I'm supposed to be working on my thesis... not long to go, must keep motivated! Unfortunately I find writing tedious and terribly boring.
I'm still struggling to come up with a reasonable set of tags for this Q: http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/q/7566/89 [tag:system] seems overly vague, [tag:table] is something too specific, both are rarely used, and neither of them conveys the important meaning about salvaging intermediate results of (interrupted) calculations. Is there an official term for methods dealing with this?
The problem for me wrt. the publishing (and the rush to write up, for that matter) is that my experiment didn't work, and it took me almost 3 years to convince myself of that and do a different experiment instead. The second one worked admirably, but it was a race against time to collect enough data.
@RM I would rather have the nouns where it refers to a specific Mathematica function rather than a general concept. For instance: Manipulate, Abort. Interruption is okay as is IMO because it's conceptually not the same as Interrupt. Nor is Evaluation to be understood as referring to Evaluate.
@IstvánZachar If you're changing all of A to B, and making A a synonym, then it might be best to retag one question with B (not removing A) and then do a merge from A->B (mod only)
we can vote on synonyms if we have enough rep in the tag
@OleksandrR hmm... but none of the *-manipulation tags actually use Manipulate. Or was your point that those should not be noun tags?
@RM Ok, I understand that now, thanks. But usually I don't have enough score to suggest a synonym. What to do in that case? I guess I shouldn't play then with such tags at all. The problem is that I would like to see community decisions, which means voting, but I cannot make a synonym as a first step. This is a bit contradictory.
Also, it is strange that while I cannot suggest a new synonym, I can manually edit each question and remove the questionable tag. Can't we do something to lower the requirements for suggesting sysnonyms?
@RM Yes, you must be right, because I once deliberately left a tag in one of my questions to be able to synonymize it, but I still did not have the score.
@IstvánZachar ah well, call me cynical, but I expect the response to be "<blah blah works well across SE blah blah. Unless it actively harms the community we won't change blah blah>."
I do think it's a minor thing though... meta posts and chat discussions should be sufficient
I wonder how severely things break if you set Orderless on CompoundExpression? Maybe it would be a fun game to do that in someone's session. Only the purest of functional programmers survive!
@OleksandrR I've noticed that when I started using mathematica I was thinking procedural. Then I started becoming more fucntional. Lately I'm not sure if I'm going back or finding some new weird place but definately I am not one of the purest functional guys
Getting used to a software that gives you so much freedom has made me a weird programmer
@Rojo judging by the code in some of your recent answers, I'd say you've found the quintessential Mathematica style. :) Certainly the language doesn't encourage functional style that strongly; it's only pretending to be functional after all. Term-rewriting style (or "rule-based programming") is a lot less familiar to most people, I would say, and takes time to come to terms with.
@Heike I don't know about that... now when I write procedural code in other languages, I'm desperate for Map/Apply/Fold/First/Last and creating pure functions on the fly
@BrettChampion remove the <plug> stuff and I'll star it... Not that I care, but it'll be messed up on the sidebar
@Rojo The thing that gets me with procedural languages I'm familiar with is all the preliminary stuff and glue code I need to get through before being able to write something that actually does something.
@Heike Supposedly. I tend to avoid the OOP features; I have more of a functional style in Python (as far as it admits that). Python's OOP is about as fully fledged as its functional features, which is to say, enough for most practical purposes, but not to the same degree as you would find in other languages.
@Heike I'm not hugely familiar with C. I've hacked in it, but not written any complete programs. A friend of mine came to Objective C from C and hated it initially, but seems to have come to terms with it now.
Also, I'm not a huge fan of OOP conceptually. I find it rather stuffy when carried to extremes and use it only where it seems to be a natural fit for a problem.
@Heike I don't really buy that it promotes reusability any more than a functional style. Compared to bare procedural style, yes, but it seems that OOP is mainly used as a slight formalization of structured programming, as a way to wrap up procedural code.
@acl Really? I thought it was fairly greedy and simply looked at similar groups and how many connections belong to a particular organization... For example, everyone at WRI is now "a person I might know", but no one in my group/lab/univ is recommended :P
@RM nontrivial doesn't imply it gets it right. I have a similar situation as you describe, but some of the ones which are suggested have no first- or second-order connection to me, yet actually are good suggestions
@acl ah yes, I've had a few of those. I later found out that in all of the cases, they visited my profile but had their tracking turned off. So it shows up as "someone from X", but usually that's descriptive enough for me to do a quick search and nail the person down (usually it's during talks and conferences). So the algo thinks: "A views B and B views A even though it wasn't made explicit that A viewed B so they must know each other"
I'm sure it's a lot more complicated than that with heavy mining, but it's fun to try and reverse engineer :)
I once saw a Dutch experiment where they had people watching a film with subtitles while tracking their eye movements. Even though the film was in Dutch and the subtitles were in another language people would still try to read the subtitles.
@IstvánZachar Actually, I meant another thing when I talked about nested Dynamics, but you are right that we should make it work with "explicit" nested dynamics too, which shouldn't mean more than extending the code a bit
@Szabolcs Are you going to be in Hungary in the near future? I'm finally moving back from London, we could organize a Hungarian Mathematica.SE event. Won't be a big one though...
@IstvánZachar each one feels more comfortable in a particular way, I'll try to make a quick solution, you let me know if you get something working first
We all know that Mathematica is great, but it also often lacks critical functionality. What kind of external packages / tools / resources do you use with Mathematica?
I'll edit (and invite anyone else to do so too) this main post to include resources which are focused on general applicability i...
I have read that one of the most under-used powers of Mathematica is term rewriting powers.
I am currently reading "Power Programming w/ the Mathematica Kernel."
It defines the three main paradigms as: procedural, functional, rule-based (ala prolog.)
Question: Is rule-based and term-rewriting ...
@belisarius I have a friend/ex-flatmate doing that. I literally could not understand what she was writing. she got the highest mark in her msc course in decades
@belisarius what worried me is that she seemed to understand what she was writing. she's smarter than me, OK, but not understanding even the thrust of a text makes me suspicious
@belisarius I did that (write their thesis) with someone for a statistics course. she got over 70% (a 1st class degree in the UK), even though I don't know what a chi-squared test is
is there a mathematica workbook of some sort? i.e. a book of exercises, where the text presents some problem. I solve it, then the text on the next page shows me how I could have solved it using 2 lines of @@ // and other operators? I feel like it would be very enligtehing and the most straightforward way to learn the mathematica way of programming
@user1311390 I'm interested. But I've found that it kind of already exists... the documentation for MMA contains a lot of examples - maybe not in the same format though.
this I want to know: how did wolfram invent Mathematica? It's both so natural (from a mathematian's perspective) and bizaare (from a programmers's perspective)
@user1311390 I'm not sure memorizing and understanding something can be attributed only to intelligence. They had so much time on their hands - no PC, no TV, no girlfriend, no kids, no most of what we have.
Needs::cxt: "Invalid context specified at position 1 in \!(Needs[\"Statistics\"]). A context must consist of valid symbol names separated by and ending with \!(\"`\")."
In this line here, MeanTest[nums, 2, KnownVariance -> 11/10] what does the -> operator do? I know it's supposed to pass a optaional parameter or something; but I'm not certain what it does.
I'm not certain these should be merged. If they are, I feel that pattern-matching should be the master.
It is used preferentially: 54 versus 15 questions at this time
It is not easily confused with design patterns
pattern-matching is at the heart of Mathematica; not having such a tag seems wro...
How to properly enable syntax highlighting for Mathematica in Vim? I want it automatically on when opening .m files with Vim too.
I have read that one of the most under-used powers of Mathematica is term rewriting powers.
I am currently reading "Power Programming w/ the Mathematica Kernel."
It defines the three main paradigms as: procedural, functional, rule-based (ala prolog.)
Question: Is rule-based and term-rewriting ...
