Wolfram Mathematica

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4:14 AM

I'm having a crisis of conscience. I took @WReach's fantastic answer to mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/838/… and started work on a package that I've posted on GitHub that takes his work and makes it feel more like Mathematica. I'm really happy about all of that, and am prominently crediting WReach's work in the package documentation.

Where the tricky part comes in is that I want to update the Q&A to reflect the existence of the package. I first posted a link as an update in the question, but that felt a little bit icky... ("Why is this guy flogging his own project in a question on StackExchange?") That didn't feel right, so I moved it to an answer instead. Seems like my new answer is the one I should mark as accepted, but I don't really want to take WReach's points.

Thoughts on what the right thing is to do here?

R.M

The "right" thing is what ever you want :) But if I were you, I would
1) accept WReach's answer, because without it, you've got no package, and it answers the question perfectly
2) post an answer pointing to your package and demonstrate how to use it. If you still feel "icky", make it CW :)
3) post an update at the bottom of your question and point to your answer (because it'll be at the bottom of the pile due to the ranking at present). Updates at the top are kind of distracting...

sblom

4:30 AM

Great tips @RM

Thanks.

3 hours later…

Szabolcs

7:09 AM

@SjoerdCdeVries Good catch! You can use the (pp) method, but it still resets the colours. I was suspecting something like this might go wrong, but I didn't manage to construct an example where it happened. So maybe I can fix it for at least one method ...

@SjoerdCdeVries Mostly rest and travel. Without a (difficult and expensive to get) visa, my gf can only "transit" through my country which means she has to arrive from A, leave to B and not stay more than 5 days. So that took care of the travel part.

Szabolcs

7:28 AM

@SjoerdCdeVries Here's something fun: create that colour chooser in a notebook and call it instance 1. Then copy the manipulate output, and paste it somewhere else (instance 2). When the initialization of instance 2 is evaluated, it resets instance 1 as well because they use the same global variable x! To make things more interesting, since x was changed, instance ` will reevaluate, which changes x again and causes instance 2 to re-evaluate again. Infinite loop until you delete one :-)

@SjoerdCdeVries So what can we do? For the (pp) method, nothing, because Edit -> Copy As... -> Bitmap seems to create a copy internally which also triggers a reevaluation of the initialization and contents. The other method also uses a copy, but this time I do the copying manually. So I can set DynamicUpdating -> False on the target notebook which seems to fix the problem for this example.

@Sjoerd I am a bit unconfortable about doing this though because once I had a side question about this in a MathGroup post. John Fultz answered and he also had a vague comment to the effect that evaluation of dynamic things is necessary to correct output ... but this was not he main topic of the post... I am just worried about getting grey boxes in some cases.

8 hours later…

rcollyer

3:25 PM

We have now crossed all the user thresholds on Area51. Most users above 2k are also above 3k, also, and we have quite a few.

2 hours later…

Stack Exchange

5:40 PM

Q: Why to excellent answers languish with few votes and what can be done to combat it?

Repeatedly I have seen good answers, some very good, receive next to no recognition. Sometimes this can be explained by the answer being of such an esoteric nature that few are interested or qualified enough to vote. Other times there is no reasonable explanation that I can see. Take for examp...