@Zviovich @P.Fonseca Twitter is such a bad platform and that guy sounds like a real jerk. How a literate scientist can call someone's opinion BS in public is beyond my understanding. An I'm sure I have to throw up if I hear "I feel offended" one more time. And this coming from a researcher who should have learned that disagreeing is what we do most of the time. I disagree with many papers I cite in each publication and others disagree when they cite me.

@halirutan Indeed Halirutan, Taleb is extremely rude and aggresive with people he disagrees with.

@Zviovich Well, then he fits right into the nature of SW himself :)

@Zviovich Ha.. even without knowing it I guessed right :)

Have you seen these?

@halirutan Twitter should be banned for the kind of discussion it promotes :) I hope for a platform where you need to add sources of your claims before publishing :P

> [...] I hope javascript front end would give better competition to mathematica. [...]

Well, I hope the opposite.

But yes, it is easier to start with Manipulate and deploy for friends with MMA/Player. And if this is a use case it is fine, but more control on gui or deployment options etc and you wonder if it wasn't a bad idea to start with MMA.

@kuba I think why CDF did not become popular, is nothing to do with deployment or functionality. Because it is closed source, no one can create a CDF file without using Mathematica. There was a great article on why PDF became the standard format for storing documents everywhere in the world. Adobe (a private company) created PDF, but it was smart to make the format public and standard, so any one can create a PDF document. This is not the case with CDF

@Nasser in academia that may be the case. From my experience deployment related limitations kick in for business applications. They usually don't mind the price as long as it can be easily integrated etc.

@Kuba yes. But it is not really about price. I am thinking about making CDF popular and having CDF be standard for interactive documents, just like PDF became standard for static documents. Just because few companies do not mind paying for Mathematica and using CDF, this will not make it popular as universal standard used everywhere.

The window for CDF might have already closed. WRI should made something with it when it was released in 2011? or so before an open/standard alternative come in.

Here is copy of the article on PDF history. It is interesting read any way. bit.ly/2oXHbkf

@Nasser Yep, my comments are more about outside academia use, not really along the discussion started by P.R.

@Kuba @Szabolcs and anyone else who makes paclets, I'm trying to see if GitHub will work as a paclet distribution server. I set up an org here github.com/MathematicaPacletServer if any of you is willing to beta-test the pull-request to submit changes process.

@halirutan I don't actually know if this set up makes much sense with GitHub given how potentially large this thing could get if someone just dumped a GB large paclet.

It feeds through my paclet server builder currently and just makes a default site: mathematicapacletserver.github.io/PacletServer but I can tweak that theme at will

Also happy to make pretty much anyone with a presence in the Mathematica community an owner of the repo.

In other fun news, WRI never requisitioned the PacletServer username on the Wolfram Cloud so I have that too.

XD

@b3m2a1 so the flow is clone -> build your paclet to ToAdd/ -> add/commit/push

?

@b3m2a1 Since you are interested in this area, have you looked at how Maple handle its package repository system? They added new one where any one can upload a package there, and then it shows up everywhere. I can download a package from Maple by clicking on a button which opens the Maple cloud. Here is the link maple.cloud/#group=packages&sort=likes&dir=desc I've used it little to download few packages.

Yeah and then I'll run the build script to add it to the PacletSite.mz, make the site pages, commit, and push.

@b3m2a1 I'd need to have something public that is finished first :P

But will keep it in mind.

Sounds good. I don't know how user friendly this flow is, just realized it was something I could whip up in an hour given what I'd already made.

@Nasser That's what I'm hoping WRI will build soon. I know it's coming from a WTC talk and a Live CEOing video, just got impatient.

@b3m2a1 the rule of thumb is: take what there is, don't trust promises. iOS player was 'comming soon' on the website for couple (~4) of years

Unless the promise comes directly from a developer in a semi official talk like here.

If I remember correctly Bob Sandheinrich was giving the talk and may have stated an expected arrival date in the fall of 2018. But it's not slated to be out until after the API repository and the Function repository. Maybe in beta though like the NeuralNet one...

I mean maybe it'll be out earlier in beta

@b3m2a1 About this page: Would it be possible to have a button or link for each package in the list which will show confused users the exact command to install/update that particular package?

Just installed Wolfram Script and gave it a try using the documentation examples:

>wolframscript -code 2+2 works out as expected returning 4, but

>wolframscript -code 'StringRevers["hello"]' complains about a String being expected at position 1 as shown above. How come?

Oops, typo above: StringReverse is of course correct.

@gwr It works in bash (on a Mac), but I do not know what is the correct way to quote/escape things in PowerShell/Windows. Maybe the shell is stripping the quotes?

The documentation seems to suggest that the syntax you used was correct, so I'm not sure ...

@Szabolcs Thanks, I will look around some more, but as you just wrote, I had suspected the documentation to comply with Windows 10 at least or point out obvious traps...

@gwr Could you try wolframscript -code StringReverse[\"hello\"]?

Or maybe wolframscript -code "StringReverse[""hello""]"

@Szabolcs >wolframscript -code 'StringReverse[\"hello\"]' does work.

@Szabolcs Yeah definitely. I’ll try to remember to implement that tomorrow in JS. I might even be able to make it open a notebook with the install command in desktop Mathematica, depending on how well the deep links work.

@b3m2a1 I thought you were not awake. What is your time zone?

@Szabolcs PST (GMT -7) so it’s the very end of my day here

@b3m2a1 OK, I'll ask you about how and where to add a description notebook "your tomorrow" (my evening).

I sent a pull request with two paclet files for now.

@Kuba Same here. The issue in academia for me personally are: I need to load files and usually, I need functionality that is not available in FreeCDF. None of my medical colleagues has Mathematica or will buy it, so FreeCDF is useless. There is no academic licence to create enterprise CDF. So if I wanted to do that, I need to buy the same expensive licence as companies do.

@b3m2a1 The SEUploader would be a nice-to-have on the paclet server.

@halirutan Are you already familiar with paclet-packaging? If not, I can help you transition the palette to that format.

@Szabolcs Yes, I know in principle what to do and have done it several times. Unfortunately, I won't be able to do anything meaningful in the next time. Work-load is just overwhelming.

Is there a way to discourage Mathematica from inserting page breaks after certain cells? Ideally, text cells wouldn't often be separated from the following In/Out cell pair. This applies to printing or creating a PDF out of notebooks.

How do people deal with the problem of inconvenient page breaks, in general?

Just a fun picture:

@Szabolcs I use PageBreakBelow -> False and friends.

I also make use of GroupPageBreakWithin. And if you have a specific structure that deserves custom GroupingRules then you could use it too.

@Kuba I guess I could use PageBreakAbove->True for all input cells, and simple make sure that every input cell has some text written above it. There isn't a way to make this conditional on cell type, right? I mean, avoid breaking above if the cell above is of a certain type.

@b3m2a1 Thanks for merging the pull request! Can you let me know when you've updated the site to include the new paclets?

@Szabolcs sometimes Dynamic options work but I would not put to much logic inside. And getting cell style is not straightforward.

@Szabolcs, what do you mean by "cell type"? Certainly, you could modify the Input and Output styles. You could also modify the StandardForm style, which would catch several sorts of things (including, e.g., Message and Print cells).

@Szabolcs Updated. And have the install script too: mathematicapacletserver.github.io/PacletServer/pages/…

@halirutan I can get that on later today. No time right now unfortunately.

Re the Romer post, I think the open source/commercial debate is a fine debate. I do both, and I certainly see upsides each way. But I have to put some personal pronouns in Romer's post because he discusses a bug in my area. I find the notion of being called a "Vandal" and contributing to "objective truth [perishing] from the Earth" to be amusingly hyperbolic. The notion that I "hide behind corporate evasion"...well, I leave that to the judgment of this community.

But being accused of introducing a bug "so bad that someone must have worked at making it bad" as an accomplice to "an intentional, hidden part of Wolfram’s strategy"? That hits home a bit. In my life, I've been wrong, I've been stupid (there seems to be no end of that!), but I try very hard to be honest.

I thought about echoing my thoughts on Twitter, but as has been mentioned, Twitter is just a terrible place for civil or useful discussion. Obviously, I have a much higher opinion of this chat room. There...off my chest, and now back to work. :) Feel free to call me out on any place where you think I'm out of line, here or elsewhere.

@JohnFultz I am looking to improve the appearance of this terribly long document by keeping the code examples (In/Out cell pair) together with the preceding description. (Of course that requires a lot of editing and tidying up too.) There are many cases where there is a small piece of text followed by an In/Out pair. I would like to keep the text together with the Input cell, but I am hoping not to have to give the text a special style.

@JohnFultz I was wondering if it is possible to prevent (or discourage) a page break before an Input cell if that Input cell is preceded by a Text cell. I do not want to prevent the page break if the Input cell is preceded by an Output cell.

All this is not very important because this PDF file is for preview only. People should use the notebook anyway.

@JohnFultz I do not think anyone here believes that PDF export was crippled on purpose. The PDF I linked above is a good example that it works well.

@Szabolcs you can run a script then, before exporting, and set break options explicitly

@Kuba Yes, that was the plan, but I was hoping for a solution with less trouble. I already run a post-processing script for this notebook anyway, so it's doable.

The one thing I'd really like to see improved in PDF export is to get rid of the blurriness in MatrixPlot/ArrayPlot outputs:

So something along:

Scan[
 If[
   ("Style" /. Developer`CellInformation@PreviousCell[#]) === "Text",
   CurrentValue[#, Background] = LightBlue
   ] &,
 Cells[CellStyle -> "Input"]
 ]

The problem appears only when viewing these with Preview.app on OS X. But Preview.app (and Mac computers) are extremely common in academia. Thus I always feel that I should not include such plots in publications (what I do is replace the Raster with individual Rectangles)

I do understand that the "blurriness" is probably just interpolation, and sometimes it is actually preferable (what if that Raster represents an image?)

@Kuba Thanks! That definitely helps. I'm not so experienced with notebook manipulation and it would have taken me longer to come up with this.

No problem, good luck.

Something weird: The Text and Item styles have black text. Surprisingly, the ItemParagraph style has dark grey text that is barely distinguishable from black, but still distinct (GrayLevel[0.2] instead of GrayLevel[0])

@JohnFultz Just in case you still look at that PDF link, the page break thing is already fixed (so you won't see the problem).