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bobajeff 17 minutes ago [-]
As sometime who's never used Wolfram Languages before this project has gotten me interested.
For sometime now I've been looking into a good CAS for my app. I've tried a few algebra problems with Sympy, Sage, Xcas, Maxima and Woxi. Of these only Sage, Maxima and Woxi were capable of giving the expected answers.
After trying it out I became fascinated by Wolfram language and other term rewriting languages they are pretty interesting even though most have little to do with CAS like WL.
Anyway I've been looking at this project and plan to seriously use it in the future. So, I've noticed a few things when attempting to run wljs (I had to wrap it with a shell script to get wljs to see it as wolframscript executable). First the version number system variable gives a string instead of the expected real number type (As a temporary hack I modified Woxi to give what wljs expects). There also is a variable that tells to the absolute path of the of the current file and it is wrong when it's used in an imported script. After working around that with hard coded paths things became more difficult.
Anyways, I'm interested in helping out don't know if I can.
Since then, we've made more than 7,000 commits and massively expanded Woxi's feature set. So it's well worth another try for anyone who tried it back then!
pama 43 minutes ago [-]
You now fully support version 1.0. IIRC, the first version of Mathematica I used back in early 1993 was 2.1 soon followed by 2.2, which was useful for a couple of years. How much extra work is it to reach full compatibility with that version? (I had used MathLink at the time.)
However, MathLink is one of the few exceptions as it is deprecated by now.
zhixingheyi2023 39 minutes ago [-]
Open-source reimplementations of mature tools are underrated. The interesting part is often not just feature parity, but making the technology easier to embed into new workflows.
Yes, Rubi mostly works by now! Performance is still a concern, but we're working on improving it. I'll add some information on how to best use Rubi to the documentation soon. I already have a draft, but didn't find the time to finish it, yet.
jshaqaw 1 hours ago [-]
I’m going to get hate here but what the heck I have karma points to burn. What I have to say is not a critique of this particular project which seems nicely done but a general statement on open source.
I’d rather see more open source projects making something new than so much “Open Source reimplementation.” If closed proprietary companies are so worthless then why do so many open source projects copy those implementations. Did Wolfram really discover the one true way in its language syntax and presentation layer? If it did, is the idea of open source really just making it unviable for companies to invest in important things like that? To be clear these are of course rhetorical questions. The open source world could experiment (and in defense sometimes does) with truly new approaches and interfaces. I just want to see more of it.
Mathematica exists. Mathematica for free versus Mathematica for money is of course a nice trade. But even better would be to try new ways to interact with mathematics unburdened from legacy concerns.
adius 42 minutes ago [-]
I think the Wolfram Language got 80–90% of it right, and that's why I want to reimplement and use it in the first place. It bothers me that I have to use inferior solutions, such as those implemented in Python and Julia, just because the better solution is prohibitively expensive.
Of course, there are a few things I think we can do better than the Wolfram Language, but given all the available legacy code, there's really no point in making it slightly different and losing the ability to use that code. However, we might build an alternative syntax and frontend in the future that surfaces the capabilities of the Wolfram Language with a better UX.
jshaqaw 36 minutes ago [-]
Good points all. Please understand this is more of a general open source friendly criticism I made. There is good value in preserving access to codebases made for Wolfram language which is expensive albeit they do offer decent licenses now to mess around with it.
I’m curious abut benchmarking. Wolfram claims they put a ton of effort into optimizing the speed of at least certain types of mathematical computations.
UX is an area I’d suggest working on. Wolfram was a real pioneer with the notebook style interface but nothing is meant to last forever. That might be an area to innovate without losing access to legacy codebases.
mvdwoord 34 minutes ago [-]
Not mutually exclusive? The fact that money is being paid for some closed source product does at least prove there is an actual demand for whatever they figured out to do, and how. So either a marginal improvement, or simply open sourcing a subset of an existing product, or making something completely new, or better... all good isn't it?
Maybe reimplementing something that already exists a couple times over leads to good things as well. I can imagine some subtle insights could be gained which matter to some of the user base.
deckar01 34 minutes ago [-]
Closed source, proprietary license, starting at $195/year. Their language is a moat for customers, and this is a bridge back out. If you aren’t getting any benefit from their development direction and the compute is happening on your own hardware, what are you paying a subscription for?
For sometime now I've been looking into a good CAS for my app. I've tried a few algebra problems with Sympy, Sage, Xcas, Maxima and Woxi. Of these only Sage, Maxima and Woxi were capable of giving the expected answers.
After trying it out I became fascinated by Wolfram language and other term rewriting languages they are pretty interesting even though most have little to do with CAS like WL.
Anyway I've been looking at this project and plan to seriously use it in the future. So, I've noticed a few things when attempting to run wljs (I had to wrap it with a shell script to get wljs to see it as wolframscript executable). First the version number system variable gives a string instead of the expected real number type (As a temporary hack I modified Woxi to give what wljs expects). There also is a variable that tells to the absolute path of the of the current file and it is wrong when it's used in an imported script. After working around that with hard coded paths things became more difficult.
Anyways, I'm interested in helping out don't know if I can.
However, MathLink is one of the few exceptions as it is deprecated by now.
https://rulebasedintegration.org/
I’d rather see more open source projects making something new than so much “Open Source reimplementation.” If closed proprietary companies are so worthless then why do so many open source projects copy those implementations. Did Wolfram really discover the one true way in its language syntax and presentation layer? If it did, is the idea of open source really just making it unviable for companies to invest in important things like that? To be clear these are of course rhetorical questions. The open source world could experiment (and in defense sometimes does) with truly new approaches and interfaces. I just want to see more of it.
Mathematica exists. Mathematica for free versus Mathematica for money is of course a nice trade. But even better would be to try new ways to interact with mathematics unburdened from legacy concerns.
Of course, there are a few things I think we can do better than the Wolfram Language, but given all the available legacy code, there's really no point in making it slightly different and losing the ability to use that code. However, we might build an alternative syntax and frontend in the future that surfaces the capabilities of the Wolfram Language with a better UX.
I’m curious abut benchmarking. Wolfram claims they put a ton of effort into optimizing the speed of at least certain types of mathematical computations.
UX is an area I’d suggest working on. Wolfram was a real pioneer with the notebook style interface but nothing is meant to last forever. That might be an area to innovate without losing access to legacy codebases.
Maybe reimplementing something that already exists a couple times over leads to good things as well. I can imagine some subtle insights could be gained which matter to some of the user base.