Mathematica 6.0 Changes Everything

[Xezlec]

The ability to recognize complex patterns (with our eyes) is an NP problem. You can write a polynomial algorithm to check if you have a match with a given memory. No one has an algorithm to search for a match to the pattern in less than an exponential number of steps in the size of the problem.

I'm well aware of that. But what makes you think the brain is solving this problem in polynomial time? I'm pretty sure it isn't. Neural networks which can solve problems of this general type have certainly been built. They require more than polynomial time. But if you have 30 billion processors working on a relatively small NP-hard problem, things go pretty fast.

These features are not amazing, but they do show how the idea of type checking parameters has evolved since the 1980s.

Sure, I'll grant you that. But this is just a way of making a tradeoff easier. You still have to actually make the tradeoff. You aren't getting both the reliability and the looseness/ease at the same time. You still have to choose one or the other when you write the code. Things are a little better because you can make this tradeoff per-function rather than per-program.

This reminds me of some C arguments I've had with some people. C gives you the same kind of freedom in some areas (I am certainly NOT trying to claim that C is on the level of a high-level language like Matlab or Mathematica, so don't even start down that path). It allows you to do some things the comparatively easy, loose, quick way or the more rigorous way. But where I work, we're required to do everything the rigorous way all the time! D'oh!

I'm going to have to create an example syntax that you can't figure out. Give me some time to work on it.

Given the direction this thread has taken, and my general lack of time (note how long it's been since last I posted), I'm abandoning this. It's not directly relevant to any of my points anyway. I'm not actually going to argue that Mathematica's syntax might be "too hard for the human mind". That would be obviously false since it's regularly used by lots of people.

Maybe I'm just weird but I'm suprised people are saying MatLab is easier to use off the bat than Mathematica. I had to learn to use one of the two of them at the beginning of the year and I tried MatLab first. Didn't have a clue WTF was going on.

Weird. I got it almost immediately. I guess it depends on the person, or something. Maybe it helps if you used to code in BASIC back in the day.

Well, as a final note, I would really like to try out Mathematica. Unfortunately, I'm no longer a student, and $2500 is a lot of cash to scrape together. So it might not happen.

 

[graphic7]

The only thing that's ever really irked me about Mathematica (aside, from the rather 'kludgy' programming language, which I don't use much, anyway) is the licensing regarding UNIX systems. Wolfram does not consider licenses for UNIX systems to be applicable to the student, and thus, does not include the UNIX versions under the student license. In order to legally use Mathematica on a UNIX system, you must have the full $2,500 license, which of course, I've had to acquire to use Mathematica on my AIX and Solaris systems.

 

[dmm]

Mathematica is lousy for making GUIs?

Weighing in very late. I'll be surprised if there's a reply, but here goes:

Where I work (gov't lab), a common situation is that an expert, who has developed a program to calculate something nontrivial, needs to put this program into a form that others can easily use. The expert is usually some sort of physical scientist, not a CS type. The "others" are physical scientists or technicians who only care about ease of use, and do not necessarily know how to use whatever package was used to develop the program. So, of course they want a GUI. These GUIs usually have lots of inputs and lots of functions. They are non-trivial. See attached jpg for example (and note that the other 3 tabs are equally complicated).

I have used VisualBasic, Visual C, Visual Fortran, and Matlab. My experience so far has been the following:
1) Nothing beats VB for making nice GUIs easily. Its built-in graphing is awful, though. However, you can buy inexpensive add-ons to give nice graphing, so that's not really an issue. The killer is interfacing it with C or Fortran, because VB itself is worthless for computing anything. (caveat: I haven't done this since VB4. Anyone know if interfacing has become easier?)
2) VC, VF, and Matlab are all about equally painful. Simply put, making user-friendly GUIs with them is not very user-friendly or GUI-driven. However, they do try. At least they have a nice GUI designer.
3) I have looked at Mathematica 6, and passed. Maybe I missed something huge when looking at the online documentation, but it looks to me like making cool GUIs for super-simple tasks is now amazingly simple, but real-life GUIs still need to be coded entirely by hand, line by line. (Corrections to this are welcome. If you're a CS-type or a Mathematica expert, don't worry about talking down to me -- I won't even realize it. I have a current project for which I'd like to use Mathematica, but this issue is a killer.)

In case this helps, my programming background is as follows: trained as physicist; started on mainframes with punch cards in F77 and on PDP-11s in assembly code; over the years have written programs (as part of my research) in F77, assembly, Pascal, F90, VB4, C++, Matlab, MathCad, and probably others I've forgotten about.