@P.Fonseca Thanks for the pointer. Got it working too :)

@Szabolcs @halirutan @Kuba @JasonB. I know you all have used Mathematica for serious dev. work. So how do you feel about Mathematica as a developer? Obviously we all enjoy using it, but I was reading this and I can't help but feel that this guy is barking up completely the wrong tree, bringing Mathematica to a tech interview.

@b3m2a1 "how do you feel about Mathematica as a developer?" 50% pissed off 50% euphoric

But more specifically, I'm not sure what he suggests. Since MMA is a commercial software/language it is probably easier/cheaper/more flexible to use existing open technologies.

Sure, quick URLRead + query + report generation is a nice use case to show its strength but what if you are interested in reducing execution time (ms), or a fancy interactive web report that will merge nicely with already used systems? Probably also possible, but I don't think so straightforward.

@b3m2a1 I'm not sure I got the point of your question :_) let me know

@b3m2a1 is there any trick to remember your nick? Does it refer to anything? I always have troubles finding you :P

@Kuba I just wanted to see if you guys felt as I did. I enjoy using the system, but would never bring it out for a tech interview outside of interviewing for a company that specifically was looking for someone who knew how to use it.

There just doesn't seem to be much growth potential in the developer space for WL so better to learn a more marketable language.

@b3m2a1 I agree, won't harm to mention it but I would not push it as a tool of choice. It is not like it can not grow in this direction but it won't because it is clearly not WRI's direction and it is too closed to be handled by community.

@Kuba it's just a handle I've had for maybe over a decade or something at this point. Basically my last name starts with B, first name with M.

@Kuba Yeah that's pretty much my impression. I was tempted to post something along those lines as a reply on his post, but decided to just ignore it. It's too bad that all this all this Mathematica knowledge and experience isn't terribly useful outside of science and engineering--but I think that's true for many things in science and engineering.

@b3m2a1 It is useful outside but deployment options, packages management, source security and scalability are limiting factors. There are limits of how such high level language can scale or be speed up but those are not barriers impossible to break. Though maybe unprofitable.

I always tend to complain too much in such discussions so I will stop here :)

Hi, I am trying to search the site for FEM error messages but I can not get this to work. I would like to search the corpus for ::fem but that does not work. I can not figure out how to escape the ::. Do you have any idea how to do it? Thanks.

@user21 In case nobody knows how to escape ::, you could use the following query: data.stackexchange.com/mathematica/query/780685

@C.E., interesting. Thanks. I did not know about this. Is there an easier way to get to the post from the ID than to paste it into the search field?

@user21 You can create a table with links in Mathematica if you want. Download the CSV with IDs and load it into Mathematica, then create the links using the following pattern: mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/id -- I believe this should work for both answers and questions.

i.e. I would suggest building the URLs, I don't know of any other way.

@C.E. thanks! Much appreciated!

np

Is it only me or is StringTemplate horribly slow? On my machine

takes 0.0005ish seconds which does not sound too much but is reeeeeaaaallly slow compared to basic arithmetic

@Sascha another 20x faster alternative StringRiffle[{"first", #a, "then", #b}, " "] &, StringTemplate evaluates to this TemplateObject which gives more flexibility otoh.

@Kuba Thanks for confirming this

I mainly use StringTemplate because I like the syntax and never noticed this issue ...until I called it a few hundred thousand times in one go

@Sascha Same here, except I didn't have to call it so many times so far.

@user21 does this search means that you have finished all your production targets, and you are here searching for bugs to get occupied!? It sounds great! (or I shouldn't read to much in between the posts... :-)

@Kuba Concerning cost, unless we are developing a product to get mass distributed or that the software costs realy expensive (>100 k€/k$) my experience is that "free" software solutions always cost more (at least in developed country environments) than commercial solutions. If this doesn't seem to be the case for someone, there's a good change that you don't know your truly daily cost...

@P.Fonseca creating a pdf report from existing dataset is a different task than custom engineering / hydrodynamics / simulations so implementation time / salary / precission needed are distributed differently. Don't claim you are not right. It just depends :) For OP case I would say you are wrong but for yours it may be worth it. Unless you need to install player across offices and IT department is highly sceptical about that :)

(@kuba I agree that it depends, the reason why I stated that it was according to my experience and that there's a chance, and not certain...)

@P.Fonseca btw, nice to see you :)

@Kuba thanks! I've been a little out... See you in Oxford?

But returning to the subject, I would add that it is my experience (from asking around), that most government related jobs have no knowledge of their daily cost reference value, and think that their cost is probably not much different than their salary (which on most cases reality is closer to several times higher).

This means that investing both on the use, but also on the development of so called free solutions might reveal to be a very bad global economy investment, although it seems to be a great idea at first (and at second and third).

Just to avoid confusion, I'm not talking of opened software, which is a completely different debate. But in reality, since on free solutions nobody is doing the balance on the cost benefit of the production and usage, contrary to commercial environment solutions where this is implicitly done by the market law (companies just die..., both on the development and on the usage side, since they can't impose their product cost), we will never know right?

@theorist If you find this... Doesn't specifying Integers also give Reduce more tools? You seem to admit it gives different tools, and I think that is sufficient to justify different results. I said "more" because the documentation related to methods 1 and 2 seems to imply that; but really the argument is not based an ordering of toolkits.

Is there a way to automatically open the control on a Manipulate, where it shows the current value?

@P.Fonseca probably not, maybe in Champaign but that is not clear either. About costs, that is a big topic I don't have big knowledge about so let me just say that I agree it is non trivial :)

@KraZug mathematica.stackexchange.com/a/118427/5478 or for a value only: mathematica.stackexchange.com/q/32848/5478

Thanks Kuba. No way to do it for an individual manipulate?

@b3m2a1 I like this quote in this context: "I call it the law of the instrument, and it may be formulated as follows: Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding."

@P.Fonseca, well, unfortunately, not all is implemented... but I am getting there. This search is an attempt to figure out what the most pressing issues in FEM are.

Is there a better way to take RandomSample without shuffling?

#[[Sort@RandomSample[Range@Length[#], 3]]] &@CharacterRange["a", "h"]

This is slightly shorter, but it still comes in random order, Sort@RandomSample[CharacterRange["a", "h"], 3]

I found a very accessible explanation of Meltdown and Spectre: raspberrypi.org/blog/…

@halirutan thanks for sharing this

@ChrisK It's a development I observe with interest during the last year.