Wolfram Mathematica

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2:47 PM

Some higher-level interface construction stuff for people who want to add special input constructors for their objects: mathematica.stackexchange.com/a/258981/38205

Nothing too interesting except for using BoxReferenceReplace to overwrite the constructor GUI (can also be used with the Dynamic[outputVar] paradigm of course and there we'd use a BoxReferenceDelete or whatever to obliterate the interface or write our final object to screen instead)

Carl Lange

3:17 PM

@b3m2a1 I knew you'd be the one to answer that question as soon as I saw it!

Jason B.

3:59 PM

@b3m2a1 - are there a couple of definitions missing?

b3m2a1

4:09 PM

@JasonB. Entirely possible let me check...

@JasonB. I renamed the functions before posting to get Matrix in the names...will edit

4 hours later…

Feeds

8:07 PM

Wolfram Blog: Six Reasons Why the Wolfram Language Is (Like) Open Source

posted on November 30, 2021 by Jon McLoone

A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece outlining why I think that open source isn’t the right business model for Wolfram’s core tech. It generated some (mostly reasonable) debate about the benefits of different models. Reflecting on that debate recently, I realized that most of the expected practical benefits of open-source software are […]

Carl Lange

8:22 PM

@Feeds I gotta say, these two blog posts aren't great takes and I feel they might be better off letting the dog sleep.

"Millions of dollars have been spent so far on Jupyter and related projects just to make thin versions of Mathematica notebooks, funded in part—annoyingly!—by my own personal taxes."

Poor form, in my opinion.

b3m2a1

@CarlLange that's exactly how I felt. Honestly cannot see the value is poking that bear

Realistically what do they expect to get out of it?

Carl Lange

@b3m2a1 Any press is good press, I suppose?

I suppose there's the "I want to use Mathematica at work so I'll forward this to my engineering manager" use cases as well.

But I can't come up with any actually reasonable answer.

b3m2a1

Maybe if there were more convincing arguments in that post, but like this:

Aside from the minor patches that we regularly push out, we shipped six full releases in 2020 and 2021. The top four averaged about 170 completely new functions on top of many improvements to existing functionality. That number is more than the total operator count in the core Python language.

Carl Lange

Very thin "reasons" in that post as well. Honestly feels a bit embarrassing.

b3m2a1

that's not doing it for me

Carl Lange

8:28 PM

No, I don't think it would do it for practically anyone.

Maybe Jon just has a chip on his shoulder about people complaining it's not open source.

b3m2a1

Yeah that's my guess

Carl Lange

The people who care that it's not open source won't be swayed by anything less than it actually becoming open source.