I love Rust for mathematical and scientific tasks (I am building the structural bio crate infrastructure), and I love Mathematica and have a personal sub. I should be the audience, but... What makes Mathematica great, IMO, is the polish and overall experience created by consistent work with applications in mind over decades. So, I look at this project with skepticism regarding its utility.
rustyhancock 28 minutes ago [-]
Similarly I'm not sure Octave ever really got that polish to compete with MATLAB.
SPSS is hilariously painful to use. Still it's only losing ground ever so slowly.
adius 57 minutes ago [-]
Sure, but you've got to start somewhere! And with the amount of progress I was able to make in just a few weeks, I'm very optimistic that the polish will come sooner rather than later.
the__alchemist 50 minutes ago [-]
Based on the list of contributors to your project, I am not sure this starting location is optimally suited to the task of building a foundation for polished, reliable, expandable software.
adius 37 minutes ago [-]
It's having ~ 5000 tests already. Used correctly, AI agents can help you improve the quality of the code!
copperx 28 minutes ago [-]
[delayed]
the__alchemist 35 minutes ago [-]
Do you see why this perspective is a red flag on its own?
s3p 39 minutes ago [-]
The sneering on HN really has no end. This is a good project! I for one am very excited to see an interpreter born out of rust.
amelius 1 hours ago [-]
Yeah, the Mathematica language is the least interesting aspect of the Mathematica system. Closely followed by the interactive notebooks.
stared 31 minutes ago [-]
The notebooks were THE thing of Mathematica, at least to me.
12 years ago, as I was finishing my PhD in quantum optics, I wanted to migrate to the stack used in industry - and picked Python. Also, that way I was an early adopter of Jupyter Notebook, as it captured what was need + was open.
Now Mathematica notebooks (still remember, it is .nb) do not have the novelty factor. But they were the first to set a trend, which we now take for granted.
That said, I rarely use notebooks anymore. In the coding time, it is much easier to create scripts and ask to create a visualization in HTML.
aeonik 59 minutes ago [-]
I disagree, the language itself is one of the more elegant parts of the system, and enables a lot of the rest of the elegance.
From a purely programming language theory, it's pretty unique.
I once tried to find a language that had all the same properties, and I failed. The Factor language is probably the closest. But they are still pretty different.
zozbot234 41 minutes ago [-]
The relevant programming paradigm is string/term rewriting, which is featured in other programming languages such as Pure. It seems to have few direct applications outside of symbolic computing itself, compilers and related fields such as PL theory. (Formal calculi and languages are often specified in PL theory as rewrite rules, even though the practical implementation may ultimately differ.)
s3p 37 minutes ago [-]
[delayed]
adius 3 days ago [-]
Hi, I'm the main developer. We're steadily getting closer to the next release which will support most features of Mathematica 1.0 plus some of the most popular newer functions (> 900 overall!). AMA!
egl2020 36 minutes ago [-]
There's a mystique around Mathematica's math engine. Is this groundless, or will you eventually run into problems getting correct, identical answers -- especially for answers that Mathematic derives symbolically? The capabilities and results of the computer algebra systems that I've used varied widely.
adius 29 minutes ago [-]
Hard to tell honestly. So far there was always some surprisingly straight forward solution If had any problems with the math engine. There is actually a lot of public research how equations can be solved/simplified with computer algorithms. So I'm optimistic.
I also stumbled upon a few cases where Mathematica itself didn't quite do things correctly itself (rounding errors, missing simplifications, etc.). So maybe it's actually a little overhyped …
utopiah 2 hours ago [-]
Interesting, thanks for sharing. Naive question as I'm not familiar with Mathematica much (but aware of it and Wolfram Alpha and related tools), how does it compare to e.g. Jupyter or Julia or maybe another language (with its framework) that might be even closer?
cs702 2 hours ago [-]
Thank you for sharing this on HN.
It's a worthwhile effort. If successful, Woxi can enable a large mass of scientists and engineers who don't have access to Mathematica to run legacy code written for it. Also, Woxi would give those scientists and engineers who regularly use Mathematica a non-proprietary, less restrictive alternative, which many of them would welcome.
How does Woxi compare to other "clean-room implementations"[a] of the same language?
--
[a] Please check with a lawyer to make sure you won't run into legal or copyright issues.
For folks who are considering passing, note that there is a "Jupyter Lite" mode in addition to "Woxi Studio" --- seems very promising and the former addressed my first concern out-the-gate.
I was wondering what's stopping some employee from something like Mathematica from taking the source code and having an agent port it to open source. Or even reconstruction from the manual. Who owns an algorithm?
If we're lucky. More likely everything bitrots as technical capabilities are lost. Slowly at first, then quickly.
fnord77 1 hours ago [-]
vibe coded?
adius 41 minutes ago [-]
Such a massive undertaking would be almost impossible without AI agents, so yeah, they help me. But with around 5000 tests, they are actually helping to improve the software quality!
throawayonthe 30 minutes ago [-]
are all the tests hand written or are some agent-contributed? curious
aaron695 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 17:06:41 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
SPSS is hilariously painful to use. Still it's only losing ground ever so slowly.
Now Mathematica notebooks (still remember, it is .nb) do not have the novelty factor. But they were the first to set a trend, which we now take for granted.
That said, I rarely use notebooks anymore. In the coding time, it is much easier to create scripts and ask to create a visualization in HTML.
From a purely programming language theory, it's pretty unique.
I once tried to find a language that had all the same properties, and I failed. The Factor language is probably the closest. But they are still pretty different.
It's a worthwhile effort. If successful, Woxi can enable a large mass of scientists and engineers who don't have access to Mathematica to run legacy code written for it. Also, Woxi would give those scientists and engineers who regularly use Mathematica a non-proprietary, less restrictive alternative, which many of them would welcome.
How does Woxi compare to other "clean-room implementations"[a] of the same language?
--
[a] Please check with a lawyer to make sure you won't run into legal or copyright issues.
How close is it to being able to run rubi: https://rulebasedintegration.org/?
Better license? Allowed for commercial operations?
- Faster startup time because of no license check
- Can run multiple instances of Woxi at the same time
- Embeddable via WASM
- Configurable via compile time flags (which features should be included)
- …
Here is e.g. all the values for the Plus[] function:
$ wolframscript -code 'WolframLanguageData["Plus", "Ranks"]' {All -> 6, StackExchange -> 8, TypicalNotebookInputs -> 5, TypicalProductionCode -> 6, WolframAlphaCodebase -> 6, WolframDemonstrations -> 4, WolframDocumentation -> 4}
I was wondering what's stopping some employee from something like Mathematica from taking the source code and having an agent port it to open source. Or even reconstruction from the manual. Who owns an algorithm?
Will everything get copied eventually?
Laws against theft. Also the same reason employees don't release the code on pastebin or something.
> Who owns an algorithm?
The org or person who was granted the software patent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patent
> Will everything get copied eventually?
If we're lucky. More likely everything bitrots as technical capabilities are lost. Slowly at first, then quickly.