Talk:Wolfram Mathematica/Archive 4

Mathematica 9
Mathematica 9 is now (1Jun2013) available and has been available since around November 2012. I won't attempt to list its changes and improvements, as such information is easily available on Wolfram Research's website. Wolfram Research offers a home edition, and my upgrade from the v8 home edition cost only $95. [I've owned Mathematica since I first got v2 for my Mac II in 1988. Its capabilities keep increasing while its price keeps dropping.) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 164.47.161.191 (talk) 18:29, 1 June 2013 (UTC)

Mathematica 8
Mathematica 8 is now available.

I will correct the article where it is no longer factually correct, but leave it for others to decide what additional functionality is notable.

There are around 500 new functions. The summary is at http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/new-in-8/. The detailed function-by-function listing of new functions (excluding those that are existing but improved) is at http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/NewIn80AlphabeticalListing.html. JonMcLoone (talk) 16:50, 15 November 2010 (UTC)


 * We should also add a new section warning about the numerous incompatibilities and subtile disruptive changes introduced by the version change. Most of not all users of 7 will want to avoid upgrading. — Aldaron • T/C 22:47, 21 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Their website has a tool for dealing with upgrade issues, which is at http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/ref/menuitem/VersionAdvisory.html --Pleasantville (talk) 15:40, 23 November 2010 (UTC)


 * That addresses none of the issues that break notebooks. In fact, I'm surprised that this isn't discussed at all in the article: Mathematica "upgrades" almost always break complex notebooks, and Wolfram support (even their costly "premium" support) does little to address the problem. — Aldaron • T/C 17:04, 26 November 2010 (UTC)


 * I don't know of any upgrading issue from 7 to 8. I think Aldaron should explain. I upgraded to 8 some weeks ago, along with all my students, and nobody has reported any incompatibility or notebook crashing as Aldaron is suggesting… 85.96.14.146 (talk) 04:27, 25 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I don't know about Alderon's errors but I've found graphics errors almost too numerous to track (on OS X): most of my figures are ruined, performance in graphics-heavy notebooks is terrible, and many serious and know bugs with figures that were present in 7 have not been fixed in 8. We've backed out of 8 into 7 and have demanded refunds. 66.194.65.197 (talk) 04:36, 26 December 2010 (UTC)
 * There is nothing wrong with graphics under OS X. The upgrade to 8 was without problem for me. Sound like you have a faulty graphics card. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.141.146.193 (talk) 11:41, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Nope. Confirmed errors. Support has reproduced them and is unable to fix them: it's (yet another) thing changed between an n and n+1 with unexpected consequences that Wolfram can't deal with. Their fix: restore 7 and give up on 8 (seriously)! — Aldaron • T/C 19:29, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

So is this "confirmed" error, the unspecified "breaks notebooks" claim that you started with or the alleged "numerous OSX graphics issues"?

I have looked through the bugs database for issues scheduled for the 8.0.1 release and I have spoken to the tech support manager. So far I have found nothing that matches these claims, or any knowledge of "downgrade to 7" recommendations or any knowledge of 8.0 bug related refund requests. I can also be almost certain that there have been no such refund requests in Europe, Middle East or North Africa, as they would have come across my desk. While no complex software is bug-free, Mathematica 8 has, so far, been well received by users.

So I am going to go out on a limb and call this entire conversation bullshit.

If Aldaron or this "other" person would like to give a tech support ticket number, license number, real name, or anything else that I can verify (either here or privately to jonm@wolfram.com) I will post any retractions that I need to make. JonMcLoone (talk) 15:04, 19 January 2011 (UTC)


 * I'll be glad to forward you the correspondence, since despite paying a fortune for "premier" "support", I've had no reply to my latest inquires for weeks. Classic Wolfram to call its (very) paying customers liars. — Aldaron • T/C 03:00, 20 January 2011 (UTC)


 * So here is what I see in your correspondence that you provided me: You reported two problems, neither of which related to broken notebooks but one of which fits with the 66.194.65.197 comment above (the one that starts "I don't know about Alderon's errors..."). The first bug was that a planet had disappeared from your charts, which tech-support identified as being caused by the (correct) downgrade of Pluto from planet to planetoid in the astronomical data. The other was that using ListPlot with a custom plot marker (a disk with a white border) was producing slightly mis-shappen rendering of the points. The disks were squashed by a couple of pixels on the diagonals so that they looked slightly diamond shaped. Tech-support provided a work-around of using Rasterize to generate a higher resolution image and scaling back down, which you rejected because it is much slower. You mentioned in your last message "There are other issues with graphs and with performance." (as in the 66.194.65.197 comment) but did not provide details. The last correspondence from tech-support states that you have been listed as an external reporter on this bug and will be informed when it is resolved. I see that it currently has the status of being under developer investigation and does indeed have you listed as an external reporter.


 * I will leave it to other readers of this thread to decide if this means that "Most of not all users of 7 will want to avoid upgrading." JonMcLoone (talk) 11:00, 20 January 2011 (UTC)


 * In case it helps, it looks a lot like insufficient antialiasing since I can get the same effect in Windows by turning antialiasing off causing "corner" pixels on the small circles, above the 50% threshold, to be rounded up to white. Since there are some options for hardware based antialiasing that would provide a difference between Mac and Windows that might be worth investigating. I don't have a Mac to test my theory on though. JonMcLoone (talk) 11:02, 20 January 2011 (UTC)


 * You miss the key points: I'm a customer, the product does not work for me, support has agreed that it does not work for me and that they can't help me, and has confirmed there is a bug they are working on, and in the meantime they've suggested I use 7 instead (i.e that I just stop using the product with the problem). To me (again, as a paying customer — remember that Mathematica costs more than all the other software I use put together) that doesn't sound like much of a fix, and sounds like something other customers should know about.


 * You can dismiss that if you like, but it's also worth noting that if I believed they would ever get around to fixing it, I'd be less concerned, however I have notebooks broken by earlier "upgrades" that were never fixed, so I'm not optimistic about the current stat of affairs. I would also be less concerned if I thought being an "external reporter" was anything but a dismissal, but I've been promised updates on more serious bugs before (truly grave ones like the one where tootips on datapoints would show text for other data points: a career killer for presenters!) and have never heard back (even when I enquire directly).


 * Also, I'm not sure that this is really the forum to be confronting customers in the way that you've chosen to. I could be wrong about the technical details or my interpretation of the case and how it is being handled, that's why I'm asking for (and paying a fortune for) help. In any case, we have both pushed the limits of Wikipedia policy now and should stop: Wikipedia tall pages are not support forums. If you can assist me, do so in e-mail, and I'll be happy to report any successes here. — Aldaron • T/C 15:11, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

Computable Data under Mathematica 8
While not inaccurate, the section on Computable Data, is no longer very complete. Mathematica 8 allows access to raw data from WolframAlpha as well as the data sets listed in this section.

Since Wolfram|Alpha data sets are huge in comparison to those listed here, this section probable needs a complete re-think. JonMcLoone (talk) 16:58, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

Why so expensive?
I'm surprised that even the home edition costs nearly USD300. How the heck does anyone expect to make healthy sales for a $300 piece of software? It reminds me of Bill Gates charging $75 for DOS on the Altair -- you can charge that much, but nobody has to like you, and bootlegs will predominate. Do all such programs by whatever company cost this much? What is this, the Dark Ages? TheLastWordSword (talk) 13:46, 14 March 2012 (UTC)


 * The business model you describe has been proven successful (e.g., Microsoft and Adobe are able to enforce high charges on commercial use while home piracy aids to lock in the hegemony), but your premise isn't valid here, because recently Wolfram is moving Mathematica toward significant utilisation of centralised online content (which naturally resists piracy), because currently Mathematica's realistic competitors (Maple) are very expensive too, and because making friends may not be Wolfram's goal. (This isn't the page to generally discuss our dislike for the consequences of enforcing certain conceptions of (intellectual) property. And dark ages hyperbole much?) Cesiumfrog (talk) 22:11, 14 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Eso es lo que ella dijo. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 190.51.187.130 (talk) 20:04, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

NPOV and "Too few opinions" tags
From the NPOV_dispute policy page:

If you add this template to an article in which there is no relevant discussion underway, you need at least to leave a note on the article's talk page describing what you consider unacceptable about the article. The note should address the troubling passages, elements, or phrases specifically enough to encourage constructive discussion that leads to resolution. In the absence of an ongoing discussion on the article's talk page, any editor may remove this tag at any time.

Since such discussion was long ago played out, I have moved the tagger (Aldaron) comments here for easy discussion.

"What I said above a couple of years ago still applies (or applies again): this article is not encyclopedic and fails to address many of the serious usability and design flaws in Mathematica in a balanced and objective way. "

This was a reference to an earlier comment...

"A good place to start might be a discussion of Mathematica's usability issues. An article without some mention of how hard Mathematica is to learn, use, relearn, and debug, is IMHO, inherently pro-Mathematica. Other points worth mentioning are its outlandish price, Wolfram's wretched support, and the cross-version incompatibilities each upgrade introduces."

These points were argued out here in the talk pages a year ago, and can be read in the talk archives.

The comment and tags followed a comment from an anon editor:

"[ Fair warning : this comment is the expression of feelings after reading this article. Due to lack of time, it offers o detailed criticism, nor pointers to references. ]

In its present state, this article looks awfully like a Wolfram's brag sheet. I was especially frightened by the need to gratuitously quote Saint Steve Jobs, holy patron of the marketers, in the second paragraph of the introduction.

This article presents what (the authors think that) Mathematica can do, without any explanation on how it does it, nor how to use the software. No description is given either of the interface, the language and the libraries other than mentioning the separation between interface and engine.

I was also surprised by the lack of any reference to any other computer algebra or symbolic math package or to the history of this field. Such articles do exist in Wikipedia, pointing to them should not be *that* hard.

This state of affairs might be the result of a covert marketing effort by Wolfram. It is more probably (alas !) the consequence of some fanboy behavior (analogous to Apple's fanboy trolling, which you can't currently avoid when writing about anything more-or-less Apple-related).

Since Mathematica is probably the most well-known symbolic math package, it deserves a *real* encyclopedic entry, not this four-color glossy. This article is, in its present state, totally useless to someone seeking information bout Mathematica.

And, no, I won't rewrite it, due to lack of time.

82.228.67.28 (talk) 08:11, 28 October 2012 (UTC)"

If there is fresh discussion, please add it here, to avoid confusion with last years discussion.

I will make a couple of comments of my own: 82.228.67.28 is now the 4th person to complain about the Steve Jobs quote being in the lead paragraph (5 if you count my agreement). There is clearly consensus for at least a move, so I have moved it down to the history section.

As I have pointed out in the past, many many other software systems are listed on this page (perhaps 50-100 of them), in the "Computer Algebra Systems", "Numeric software", "Image Processing", and "Statistical software" sections as well as the "Connections to other software" section. If you expand all these sections they account for about 1/5 of the article.

82.228.67.28's remaining comments about wanting "how to use it" and "how it works" sections may be valid, though I suspect hard to write succinctly. JonMcLoone (talk) 17:58, 30 October 2012 (UTC)


 * There has been no ongoing discussion for a month now, so in line with WP policy, I will remove the tags. JonMcLoone (talk) 11:04, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

Silly edit on "Omissions"
Mathematica is unusual among computational system for including spell-checking. (For example there is no spell-checker in Matlab or Maple. For $800 you can buy the Analyzer Toolkit add-on to run spell checks in LabVIEW.) Calling it a "notable omssion" that Mathematica (like Excel) requires a key-stroke to invoke spell-checking is just silly. The other "omission" is already described in the article 4 lines lower.

An encyclopaedic article is not the place to make feature requests. Someone should revert this edit. JonMcLoone (talk) 17:34, 19 November 2012 (UTC)


 * Mathematica claims "document-based workflow" and touts its document generating features and document deployment scenarios. At $2500 (for individuals), "stunning" is probably a better word than "notable", but let's stick with that.  — Aldaron • T/C 18:46, 19 November 2012 (UTC)


 * If it lacked spell-checking then that would probably be notable. But we are we are talking about whether the UI to access a feature is as automatic as you would like. Is this really what you had in mind when you added the "may not include all significant viewpoints" tag to the article? (And its $300 for individuals, $2500 for commercial users). JonMcLoone (talk) 16:55, 20 November 2012 (UTC)


 * I don't know if it is notable or not, but the style of the edit is not very neutral - framed with "highly priced", etc. I will re-phrase it just to give the facts. Samither (talk) 16:43, 22 November 2012 (UTC)


 * These are notable omissions for expensive software, given that as-you-type spellcheck and multi-level undo are nearly universal features of even freeware and tools for typing nothing but short messages. This is especially the case for professional grade software that touts it's document-related features. Certainly anyone shopping for software if this caliber (and price) would assume that these features were present. That's what makes them omissions that are notable and worth mentioning here. Edit restored.  — Aldaron • T/C 20:36, 23 November 2012 (UTC)


 * I'm a frequent user of Wikipedia but have no experience actually making edits. Just want to write my opinion here, I agree with others above that this comment on omissions seems like a thinly veiled feature request, and that this is not the place for including it.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.200.174.63 (talk) 18:04, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

Mathematica 9
I have corrected the article where the release of Mathematica 9 made it factually incorrect, but as usual, I shall leave it to others to decide what new capabilities should be added to the article.

Documentation on these can be found at http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/SummaryOfNewFeaturesIn90.html and http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/NewIn90AlphabeticalListing.html

The Marketing version is at http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/new-in-9/ JonMcLoone (talk) 11:25, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

product history disclosure
I would like to see the history of Mathematica transferred to this article (included in its own section) without having to go through Stephen Wolfram's page. The only thing said in the article as is are the release dates/version history and a brief mention of SMP.69.146.144.86 (talk) 19:12, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

What parts of the history on the Stephen Wolfram page, do you think are relevant? It looks mostly like the history of Stephen on that page? JonMcLoone (talk) 13:59, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

People working on Mathematica
Is there any information on the type of people who build Mathematica? As in, what do they typically study, how many people work there etc. It seems these people must be highly specialised. I find it interesting... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 151.225.48.65 (talk) 01:22, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

Number of users
Is there any data available on the number of people using Mathematica? Or the number of licenses sold? Back in the Mathematica 3 book, it said more than a million users worldwide, but I'm somewhat skeptical of the figure. I just done a search on the monstir job site, for jobs calling for specific knowledge of software packages I've come across


 * MATLAB 191
 * Labview 36
 * Maple 7
 * Mathematica 3
 * HFSS 3   (This is seriously expensive software !!)
 * Agilent Vee 2
 * Agilent EMPro 0

which leads me to think Mathematica is not that common in industry - or maybe the people using Mathematica in their jobs are so happy, they never leave their jobs.

I guess Wolfram must know the number of licenses sold, but in many cases they will be for universities, and its probably hard to know how many of the people in the uni actually use the software. How many people use pirated copies?

Does anyone have any numbers? Dave Drkirkby (talk) 11:59, 13 October 2013 (UTC)

Mathematica 10
The changes in Mathematica 10 are listed at http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/new-in-10/ and in detail at http://reference.wolfram.com/language/guide/NewIn100AlphabeticalListing.html JonMcLoone (talk) 11:18, 14 July 2014 (UTC)


 * None of these links provide for easy isolation of the many quirks and bugs introduced by version 10 into version 9 notebooks. Is there a tool for tracking these down?  — Aldaron • T/C 13:28, 16 July 2014 (UTC)

Expanded Lead plus History section (request)
"computational software . . . based on symbolic mathematics" maybe a perfect definition, if so it deserves to be unpacked a little. As a 55 year old 1st year university student, this is a request for the Lead to provide more context, the world it was born into and/or how it now sits in the university, software and industry worlds. This should warrant a History section, perhaps a compare and contrast (i.e. computational software not based on symbolic mathematics) or a common misconceptions section. Please understand I fully appreciate the page as it is. Andrew Church (talk) 23:50, 19 July 2014 (UTC)