Figured out a way cut my IDE's tab switching to a minimum by dumping the current notebook expression to MX in a temporary cache directory and loading from the cache if the cache is newer. Means I a) no longer save at every single switch and b) am able to avoid reparsing of things like .wl and .m files which can take a very long time. Any other performance enhancements people can thing up?
The big hang up is unfortunately how slow the FE is to write/delete content in a notebook which I don't think is possible to circumvent.
NotebookPut isn't really any faster at this point.
@halirutan Hey! I can ask on the meta post but could you help me out and compile an explanation of what your goals are as a site for changing your site name right now? What's happened (if anything) to make this change necessary, what are you hoping to get out of it, that sort of thing.
@Catija The underlying problem a few years back was that Mathematica, the program, has a programming language which never had a proper name.
Stephen Wolfram initiated a major rebranding some years back and gave the programming language that is used by Mathematica the name "Wolfram Language".
As said in the meta post, Stephen Wolfram, reached out and asked if we can include "Wolfram Language" in our site image. Since almost each question on our site contains code, the community agreed that this is a good idea. It doesn't really matter that it won't impact search machines because people still tend to use "Mathematica" as search string.
@Catija The reason why I haven't reached out to you guys in the first place was that we weren't even sure the community would support this request by Stephen Wolfram.
@Catija That we haven't reached out after the initial voting is probably my fault. I thought it's better to get the agreement of the community first before bothering SE staff.
Since I was the one who assembled the final logo we are currently using, I didn't see a problem with this. But now that you say it, it would have been wiser to include SE in this discussion as well.
> What's happened (if anything) to make this change necessary, what are you hoping to get out of it, that sort of thing.
I know that we've used content y'all have designed in the past, so I can understand why it might seem like we could just use what y'all came up with... I'm not certain we can't but we do have our own design guidance that we need to go through before we can make changes. :)
@Catija To answer this clearly: When we started, there was only the program Mathematica with its programming language that didn't had a real name. This changed a few years back and now the name "Wolfram Language" is generally accepted and it is a good idea to at least mention it in the header logo.
Mostly I'd hate for y'all to pick something you love that we can't use for some reason or other... also... your chat logos are still the old ones. :/ Oh, that's right... we haven't updated the SVGs yet. That needs to get put on a list... somewhere.
@Catija I understand that and I paid attention to use the same color for the text as on the main page and make only small adjustments. A big improvement is that the graphics in the logo doesn't reveal ugly SVG artifacts anymore.
@halirutan So, ... I'm not sure if you're up to speed on what all we're working on right now. We've got ten sites to design from scratch and a handful of sites looking for some changes to be made after the redesign last summer/fall... so what I'm trying to figure out is if this is a "nice to have" or a "our site really needs this to function" situation.
From how you're phrasing things, it's reading more like a "nice to have" end of the spectrum.
@Catija The SVG artifacts should have been fixed for a long time but I never found the time to work on this. This would be one major reason for replacing the current logo on it's own.
@Catija Is there work involved besides simply replacing the SVG images that I'm not aware of?
@Catija I can help with that. The text in the SVGs is manually hinted and I'm happy to help adjusting dimensions, etc. for other uses if you give me the pointers.
The thing is, it's not just y'all... we've got a discussion over on Code Golf right now about changing their site name from Programming Puzzles & Code Golf to just "Code Golf" with a subtitle... and we're going to have to have a talk with Motor Vehicle Maintenance & Repair soon about their name... so if more and more sites need some sort of descriptive subtitle, we need to look at a more holistic solution... a network-standard, if you will.
Right now, I don't think we have any such sites... but we may very well have three or more... it's kinda a bigger discussion.
We've had people confused about the site scope on many sites. We do have the little site blurbs but they only appear for users who aren't logged in and, for some reason, the blurbs aren't picked up by Google for search.
Oh, and we were looking at y'all's...
> Mathematica Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for users of Wolfram Mathematica. Join them; it only takes a minute:
@Catija OK. Do you have a suggestion how to proceed on our side? Can we be of help (even if it's just finding all those places that might need improvement)?
@halirutan I appreciate that. Even then, that doesn't mean this will be a quick change. I can leave a comment on your last meta post to say that we've seen it and are discussing it but I don't have a timeline for you on when this can actually be implemented.
@Catija All I can say is that we certainly respect if you don't have time for that at the moment and that our community is happy to help making your work as easy as possible.
I'm going to leave that comment and get some sleep... but I do encourage y'all to let me know if there's anything else you'd like me to know! You'll be able to ping me in here or on that meta post.
@Catija These are usually valid questions of the type "I tried to do XXX, but it doesn't work. What am I doing wrong?" If it turns out to be a confirmed bug, we try to add a small header to the question to make searching and answering them (once they are fixed) easier.
@halirutan Ah, I see. So it's not so much that you're intentionally creating bug reports but users who run afoul of bugs in the program ask about errors and you're helping to track those. Gotcha.
Cool. :D Oh, and do let us know if there's anything you need help with from us ... it looked like there was some discussion about a live streaming thing...
A second question: Stephen Wolfram is interested in doing a live streaming event based on bugs (including these: https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bugs)
@Catija On a side note: For exactly this reason we tried to convince Wolfram to make their bug-tracker open. Just a few days ago, there might have opened an opportunity to discuss this with Stephen.
Yeah, SE isn't a great bug tracker in general but it is (probably) a pretty good platform for a company to stay in contact with users who have questions about their products... right now we have fully public, and fully private but we don't have that middle place ... stuff that's public but questions that really need an answer from the company rather than random users on the internet.
Anyway, I need to sleep... and my battery's dying now, too...
@Catija That good thing is that we have quite some Wolfram employees as regular users here who provide high quality content.
@Catija Yep. Have a good night.
For all coming to the chat this morning/evening, please note this comment
Dropping a note here to say that we're aware of this discussion. I don't have any real info for you but I do appreciate the systematic way you've gone through this discussion! We'll be considering this request but do be aware that we have some very busy people on our design team and, even with designs created, they need to go through an internal review process and there's some other considerations about subtitles for our sites. But, we're aware and discussing. I'm pingable here or in your chat room if I can help. — Catija ♦18 mins ago
@HenrikSchumacher You might remember the discussion you had here about distributions. Since this issue (with the same user) popped up again, I was discussing with Kuba if we can make a Q&A clearing the meaning of the usages of DiracDelta within Mathematica.
If possible, we want to prevent further discussions of the type "the integral under consideration has no sense. Upgrade your math." You appear to have in-depth knowledge about this topic and we would like to know if you would be up to make a Q&A on the main site about this.
@HenrikSchumacher I would leave it entirely up to you and only suggest that you take the content of this discussion and probably also include the situation here.
@HenrikSchumacher I would argue you can make a self-answered question. If you like, I can post it of course, but then I'd need input to make the question as concise as possible.
@HenrikSchumacher Take some time to think about it and if you need me or anyone else, just say so. It would be really great because then, we had a Q&A we can refer to when more of those comments appear.
@HenrikSchumacher Yes. I looked over his posts and he definitely doesn't appear to be a troll. However, it doesn't help if he chimes in on every post that contains DiracDelta just to say it's wrong.
@b3m2a1 Well, that won't help the majority. I guess our time is better spent when we make a meta post and dig through our complete site to look out for places where we want to adapt the wording of some things.
If SE is making a larger change anyway, those things could be updated as well.
Here, I discuss benefits of switching from an email-based support to an open issue tracking system for Wolfram Mathematica from the perspective of a user.
It's a bit of a surprise that it's a big task to replace the header image. It would have been nice to see soon, but I suppose I'm getting unnecessarily invested in the colour of the bike shed :)
@CarlLange my sense from what @Catija said is that if we were a one-off it might be faster, but they have enough similar requests that they don't want to rush in and do a bunch of one-offs if a more complete solution could exist.
@b3m2a1 Yes, and I suppose they need to have some discussions about standardisation and so on, but it feels a bit like making a mountain out of a reasonably-sized hill.
Well, hey, I know nothing about how the site works underneath. Maybe the logo is baked into the code in some way that makes it hard to change without rolling out tons of other stuff.
Perhaps mildly annoyed that the design change a few month ago was unasked for by the community and put upon us regardless, and that when the community does have a request it's put on the long finger. But I haven't had a coffee yet so more likely that I'm just being grumpy
IT can make complicate things much more simple, but alas sometimes IT creates overhead where things in fact are rather simple. From reading about the “hum and haw” SE makes about changing this site’s logo to fit with its scope and its users’ preferences, I get the impression we have a case of the latter here. Too bad. :(
I've noticed that the symbol list for syntax highlighting doesn't include many symbols that are new in version 12. For example:
(* Working symbol first as an example of correct highlight: *)
NormalDistribution
(* Broken symbols :'( *)
SubsetMap
AttentionLayer
WebExecute
and so forth.
I don't...
@CarlLange Perfectly fine. On meta we have it archived for the future. For minifying I simply use a terminal program or Webstorm. It doesn't really matter to me.
Mathematica's front-end layout setup is really a mess to work with. I've tried every possible hack to get a Pane-d element inside a nest Grid to not jostle around by a point or two when its content length changes (keep in mind the content only extends to the right, but the jostle is up and down).
Obviously there's no line wrapping, there's a fixed height for the Pane, I've configured it to have Spacings->0, etc.
All the best practices
But the FE still changes the layout arbitrarily. It just...doesn't look professional.
But I can't fix everything in space because I need it to be adaptive, too. And I can't do a full Dynamic re-calculation of a layout because then I hit race conditions no matter how much setting of TrackedSymbols and Refresh I do. Also it'd just be prohibitively slow
Wild. Also this happened:
It just froze like that, even though the content had already been parsed and I'd grabbed it out.
I guess what would really be nice, as with everything in Mathematica, is if a more targeted, lower-level Qt-based windowing/layout/cell API were exposed.
It'd only help the obsessives like myself or @Kuba but it'd make everything so much cleaner.
Ah also exposing the element update/listener framework in some manner independent of Dynamic. Dynamic just simply doesn't scale in any predictable way.
I've noticed that the symbol list for syntax highlighting doesn't include many symbols that are new in version 12. For example:
(* Working symbol first as an example of correct highlight: *)
NormalDistribution
(* Broken symbols :'( *)
SubsetMap
AttentionLayer
WebExecute
and so forth.
I don't...
