I'm almost exclusively a Mathematica programmer nowadays and feel like it's the right tool for most of things I work on (recreational math, some game theory, and export of computed results to web infrastructure via JSON). I have trouble remembering the built-in function names though, and usually work with a five-page long cheat sheet right next to me that I've created myself. I often find other people's Mathematica to be almost indecipherable, though, even though I'm a frequent borrower of such material from other people's code. For example something like this subsets[list_] := Distribute[Map[{{},{#}}&,list], List, List, List, Union] gives me a headache to even look at. It's like reading one of those sentences that has four consecutive 'that' 's in it. On Thu, Aug 14, 2014 at 3:53 PM, Eugene Salamin via math-fun < math-fun@mailman.xmission.com> wrote:
Mathematica is unreadable. I simply ignore Mathematica code in the math-fun posts. I'll use Sage as far as possible, and would consider buying the student version of Maple. Now, Macsyma was a complete winner. But due to a very bad decision, it is now being held hostage, and no reasonable person would pay the ransom for its release.
-- Gene
________________________________ From: Dan Asimov <dasimov@earthlink.net> To: Eugene Salamin <gene_salamin@yahoo.com>; math-fun < math-fun@mailman.xmission.com> Sent: Thursday, August 14, 2014 3:14 PM Subject: Mathematica
Is it just my imagination, or is Mathematica syntax between 5 and 100 times as clunky as it needs to be?
Sometimes I feel it's like programming with Cobol^Cobol.
--Dan
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-- Thane Plambeck tplambeck@gmail.com http://counterwave.com/