@magma Thanks. Re: why RLink - That's a delicate question :). Let me put it this way: R is the language spoken by entire statistical community, containing thousands professionals and original researchers, often in specialized sub-fields. So, R contains the bleeding-edge reasearch techniques implementations.
@magma But, R is mostly focused on statistics. It is a general-purpose language, but its strongest point is stats. So, Mathematica can still be a (much) better choice for more complex tasks involving other parts, plus of course Mathematica has a lot of what R does not have - dynamic visualizations, arbitrary precision computations, lots of symbolic and other math functionality. And of course, its statistics functionality is quickly catching up (in a large part due to Andy, Sasha and other folks)
@magma Matlab is different from R in many respects. It is less clear that M + M can be a powerful combination. Also, technically, R has much smaller impedance mismatch with Mathematica, being also a functional language with immutable expressions and essentially no pass by reference
@magma I think that depends on what you ask for. @Andy would answer that better, but of course Mathematica physically can not have all the bleeding edge research implemented - and it is not even clear if that's be a good thing or not. Also, Mma made enormous leaps in statistics in the recent two versions.
@magma R has advantages for cutting edge research as its open source and used by most of the statistics community. If you poke around R-forge you can find implementations of algorithms for very specific purposes.
@Leonid Seeing what it's like here I think it's good that you could bike at all. But yes, living next to campus is very good. It was also a necessity---I still don't have a driver's license.
@Brett I was wondering, does M9 have HiDPI support?
@Szabolcs In US it is generally pretty hard to live without a car - it is a car country. I actually had to go further and become a semi-pro car mechanic - since I didn't have money to pay mechanics at the time.So I ended up fixing cars for myself and my friends rather than doing my research :)
Its common place anymore for researchers to write an R implementation for any new statistical technique they develop. With thousands of such papers coming out each year there is no way that M could (or even should) capture all of it.
The benefit of linking with R is having access to all of these packages right in M. You can manage your workflows as usual and then seamlessly call on R to do things M just doesn't yet (or maybe never will) do and then continue on your merry way as if you never called R. For some there is also the need for various parts of their work to be open source for verification purposes (think random number generation used in legal cases).
@LeonidShifrin Hi Leonid. I guess there will be a lot of new questions on the site now ... feel up to answering another 20k+ points? No rest for the wicked. :)
@David yes, I think you and your R-loving colleagues will love this. They won't have to learn M to use R within it and your code will now be able to be collected single notebooks.
stay cool @Szabolcs the real version seems to be out (also the upgrade). Perhaps not so for Premiere service users yet, but i guess it is a matter of hours
Looks like you can only use SocialMediaData for yourself (i.e., needs explicit authorization). I can't find a way to use it with a random public profile
Murta's question about invoking Mathematica from inside SQL Server was related to scripting as well as SQL, but it wasn't tagged as such (so I added the tag). Only 17 questions have the scripting tag, but I'll bet there are more (untagged) questions. I haven't found much good reference material ...
@acl Now this is really funny,since I have the same story verbatim,both coming with the apartments (we were renting a house with friends in the US), and actually the Lebowski part
I also remember watching being John Malcovich
@acl Yep. Also, the lack of control over what I am being fed
@LeonidShifrin right, that's why I can't even watch online video tutorials. I lose patience after a few seconds. with text you can read and skim at your own speed, but not with a video.
@LeonidShifrin probably. when I actually think of the effort I've put into setting up my computer environment just so, it's worrying. It's more than I've ever cared about my apartment (well, except writing implements, over which I am also irrationally picky). strange
@acl Well, it was the same for me before (and still is to some extent), but the conversion to a programmer made these things less dramatic for me, since I frequently had to set up fresh machines and work on them right away
@acl One good thing it made me realize is how little I really need to do my work. At a minuimum, I just need M, WB, FTP client, SSH client, Email client, and that's pretty much it
@AndyRoss @LeonidShifrin One of the R things I'm planning to try is the one I discussed here. I don't know the least of R, but if this works from within Mathematica it would be very nice. Have any of you already tried this?
@CHM so far so good. Still not sure how helpful the predictive interface will be for me. Poking around at the new functionality I've found a variety of things that seem useful
@LeonidShifrin sure, for me emacs (and maybe some other editor, but I need emacs for working on remote machines), latex and mathematica are the only things I really need (on a unix). but...
@SjoerdC.deVries I did not try this, but I can look at it, and add an answer if I get any success. Since I already looked at this stuff before in Java context, that should not take that much time. Will put that on my todo list to do that soon.
OK overall, and from superficially playing with it, this seems like a really nice update. especially the new stuff in the frontend (which is what I spent most time with).
Usually it's there by default (if I navigate with the mouse). It's not there if I navigate with the keyboard (understandably) or if I change the output somehow (e.g. select a different layout for a graph using the context menu)
@SjoerdC.deVries does it do what you need? It isn't as easy to interpret as say SpearmanRho, KendallTau or Correlation (and tends to suffer for huge data) but the hypothesis test HoeffdingDTest sort of makes up for that.
Suppose you have Mathematica for Sites (i.e. site licence) with active Premier Service. Are you supposed to be able to download M9 from the User Portal (when it shows up) or do you have to wait for your site licence manager to send you a copy?
@SjoerdC.deVries BSOD should not even be possible from a user-mode program. You probably have a buggy driver or a memory fault. Download WinDbg and debug that bug...
@acl if you're concerned, repeatedly search for stephen wolfram nudes in the Documentation Center. If WRI is logging anything, he'll get so freaked out (\[FreakedSmiley]) that they'll soon stop. ;)
@Ajasja Oh, yes, I just lost the context. For Git, I use SmartGit from Syntevo, or sometimes command line. For CVS, I used SmartCVS. For SVN, I use TortoiseSVN. However, when in WB, I often use built-in CVS client.
@LeonidShifrin Ahh, forgot about that. Just started using WB recently, after I gave up on the MMA frontend as an editor for large packages. It was a switch for the better.
@SjoerdC.deVries I can't reproduce what you are seeing, do you mind if I give you a call? (I've managed to misplace your phone number, so please email it to me if you want me to call you).
@Ajasja @acl I have a very raw prototype of that IDE-like thing, it has code highlighting (built-in), tabbed interface and I use my code formatter to format the code. But it is very raw at the moment
@LeonidShifrin yes that would be nice. I spent some time trying to write a palette to show me the functions in a notebook (like the m file editor) but in the end just gave up. too much for me
@acl This will in fact be a very good opportunity for me, since the IDE currently is using 3 distinct components, which I can place as sub-projects. My idea is to have a project installer and a set of dev.tools that would be based on a lightweigth Github gist format and allow people to easily post their code, even small snippets, from within M.
@rm-rf that's why one should use WWB with some decent editor-plugin (vi or whatever). The FrontEnd is useless for serious programming (but good for small testing, even more now with the nice command completion)
@RolfMertig "The FrontEnd is useless for serious programming" - I think, this is not a problem inherent in the FrontEnd, and hope to be able to change that.
@LeonidShifrin but can you make it possible to alter indentation easily? eg select a block and indent it further? I haven't managed to control this sort of behaviour in the FE, and that's really the kind of problem I have with it. I can't reshape code, so I use an editor for anything big (or the WB)
@Ajasja It doesn't autocomplete templates for your own functions either... several such little things that I've gotten used to in the FE are what I miss in the WB
@rm-rf @acl @Ajasja Generally, I don't think that WB is the best fist for M development, at least when you need high level of interactivity. It is much better than a text editor etc, but FrontEnd is still orders of magnitude more interactive. Let's keep in mind that Eclipse was created mostly with Java in mind, and Java has a different workflow. One can of course write some plugins to enable part of that interactivity, but it has not been done yet
@LeonidShifrin @acl I agree with acl's group indentation statement. I often find myself copying code into BBEdit (a Mac programmer's editor) to do just that. I don't believe that WorkBench offers that capability.
@Rojo Type a line of multiline code (e.g. Module), hit enter for a new line, tab to get to your desired indentation, type some more, hit enter again. I would expect the cursor to be at the indentation of the previous line, not where mma thinks it should've been
I'm also wondering if the license administrator needs to do something before we can download ... if yes, it might take a while ... maybe @WalkingRandomly knows if this is the case
Just to know if I need to bug the license admin :)
@OleksandrR. Well, that depends on how your school is set up. I think what Arnoud was saying is that sending it out to the school's admin will take a while
@EricBrown If you have Premier Service, then I am told you should see the upgrade in your portal by now. Please email info@wolfram.com and they should be able to help you right away.
@OleksandrR. As @rm-rf said, it depends how your site license is set up. Sites can opt to let Wolfram handle things, but they aren't required to. site.wolfram.com/welcome-unst.html#distributing
@acl I think there are fundamental reasons why multiple Undo is absent, and they are pretty much the same as for other parts - the problem solved by FE is just too general :). M notebooks are also M expressions, and can be modified in a number of ways. Making a generic Undo stable is a very hard task, and making a point solution is against the M spirit :)
@Matariki Multiple undo will require a major overhaul of the front-end as it wasn't built initially to handle it. Bolting it on afterwards would be icky, very very icky.
Did you guys completely figure out how to navigate the auto-completion features using the keyboard only? I'm thinking of the down-arrow that appears after typing Plot TAB to select or just view the templates
A word of warning for those about to install V9: Make sure you haven't got any other Mathematica version running!! It apparently led to font corruption and a total BSOD as soon as the [Distributed] character was loaded. I reinstalled everything and seem up and running again.
Don't kill me for saying it, but multiple undo has never been the main feature I wanted ... it would definitely be nice, but it's not what makes me happiest
Down Arrow seems to highly the button for me. I think it would be intuitive if it immediately opened the menu... Or if pressing Down Arrow again opened it.
@Szabolcs I am definitely interested in hearing all the keyboard shortcuts related to this new feature. Only one I've discovered on my own is above: Down Arrow followed by Enter after entering a full symbol name.
@acl To undo a change, you need to have 2 things: have a well-defined notion of a "change", and maintain enough state information to actually undo it. I suspect that both things are problematic for M FrontEnd / notebooks, the first one hard in principle, and the second hard due to the way FE is built. I may be wrong though, I am no expert on this.
When people ask for an undo, they aren't asking for changing the state of the kernel... more often than not, they merely want to go back a few characters or redo a few over zealous backspaces
@rm-rf That's why I said that the problem seems to me partly conceptual and partly implementation-bound. My feeling is that whatever internal data structures are used to represent notebooks, cells etc in the FE, they are harder to manipulate than buffers in vim, perhapse due to immutability (nb is an expression).
You know when you intend to call someone and put it off so long that calling would be embarrassing?... I think multiple undo might be a bit like that :)
@rm-rf I am not claiming that a sensible undo can not be implemented rather easily.All I am saying is that from the pointof view of M development, what we mean by sensible Undo will be a point solution.
@rm-rf That's the kind of simple undo i want for the times I accidentally hi-light the entire cell and start to type away. Kernel undo would be nice too, but I'd probably disable it or memory constrain it to the point I wouldn't use it anyway
@rm-rf In fact, I was analyzing the possibilities of getting multiple Undo in the framework of Program-style test cells (syntax-highlighted by my highlighter), and found that in principle it is quite doable. I just really did not have the time.
@SjoerdC.deVries I said a user-mode program can't cause a BSOD. If a font issue exposed a bug in your graphics driver then all bets are off because graphics is kernel-mode code. :) BTW I had problems with that pesky \[Distributed] too... although it was because I foolishly installed M7 after M8.
@LeonidShifrin The more you talk about your projects in the pipeline, the more impatient I am for your alternate front end... you need to get off chat :)
Is there a difference between the "trial" and the full version of mathematica 9. Got my premier service # after I downloaded the trial. Trial seems buggy
@AndyRoss HoeffdingDTest Is an interesting and potential very useful feature. I'll try to see how it compares to MINE using the data sets published with the article on MINE. Obviously, you don't think much of it as it hasn't received much attention on the "New in..." pages.
wait to be clear ... if I use my full activation code is the "trial" download any different than what I would download under my premier service. Or is it just a license difference.
@SjoerdC.deVries I wouldn't say I don't think much of it (that would be self defeating). We chose to promote the more general IndependenceTest and CorrelationTest over the individual named tests.
@AndyRoss I was wondering about the statistical correctness of using a whole bunch of tests together. Wouldn't that amount to capitalization on chance in some way?
@Szabolcs You can go directly to the docs (without inserting the function) by clicking the little box at the end. Do the docs say how to do that via keys?
@SjoerdC.deVries I'm going to go out on a limb and say it isn't the same as multiple comparisons. Its really performing the same test but looking at it from slightly different angles. If all of the tests tell a similar story then it gives confidence in the conclusion. If they tell a different one, it can be interesting to figure out why.
@Szabolcs When the dropdown menu appears the first item is highlighted. Selecting with tab or return works for me. I can move down using the cursor down key.
@ArnoudBuzing that would be very interesting (I imagine you are talking of the customized predictive). This means that we could create some sort of intelligence to our own tools, making them less plug-in looking. Also, and I'm sorry to insist on the other topics that are of importance to me, what about a super/multi cell for spreadsheet environment, or a drag and drop similar to system modeler?
