Jon Harrop wrote:
Xah Lee wrote:
And on this page, there are sections where Mathematica is compared to
programing langs, such as C, C++, Java, and research langs Lisp,
ML, ..., and scripting langs Python, Perl, Ruby...
Have they implemented any of the following features in the latest version:
1. Redistributable standalone executables.
2. Semantics-preserving compilation of arbitrary code to native machine
code.
3. A concurrent run-time to make efficient parallelism easy.
4. Static type checking.
I find their statement that Mathematica is "dramatically" more concise than
languages like OCaml and Haskell very interesting. I ported my ray tracer
language comparison to Mathematica:
<snip>
Mathematica (and MatLab) have a few large advantages over python / scipy
/ sage
1- although normally the cost a huge amount of money, students gets them
(almost) for nothing (reminds me of a drug dealer ;-)
2- MatLab is thé industrial standard
3- Wolfram's and Mathworks websites are a huge source of (simple)
theory and examples
4- a large number of publishers only accept articles based on commercial
packages like MatLab / Labview
5- they form alliances if they come too close together ( e.g. MatLab and
LabView)
So how does a small community like the Python / Scipy / Sage community,
which it's enormous diversity / induviduality (if I don't like one tiny
detail, I'll start something completely new),
ever think they are going to beat those commercial packages,
even if the product, is technical speaking, much better ?
Well I still have some hope,
the recently published MatPlotLib documentation / galery is a good example.
just my 1 cent (considering there's a recession),
cheers,
Stef
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