Mathematica 7 compares to other languages

[Almar Klein]

I did some image processing in Mathematica once. It allocated 2GB
of memory to do display a normal size image. The professor (not of
my university) who gave the course I was following then, was a big
Mathematica fan. He also used lots of sentences containing
"quite striking", "highly efficient", "extreme" and other power-terms. I
know see whom he got it from. When I hear a person talk like that for
long enough, everything he says starts to sound like lies. One good
example was the bold statement that Mathematica is MUCH faster
than Matlab. Clearly, when considering low level task like convolution
both programs will use efficient C implementations, and I can't imagine
one being faster than the other.

Personally, I liked Mathematica for symbolic calculations, but for
numerical stuff, frankly, it sucks.

Glad to get that off my chest.
Cheers,
  Almar


2008/12/1 Xah Lee <xahlee at gmail.com>

> On Nov 30, 7:30 pm, Xah Lee <xah... at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Wolfram Research's Mathematica Version 7 has just been released.
> >
> > See: http://www.wolfram.com/products/mathematica/index.html
> >
> > Among it's marketing material, it has a section on how mathematica
> > compares to competitors.
> http://www.wolfram.com/products/mathematica/analysis/
>
> Stephen Wolfram has a blog entry about Mathematica 7. Quite amazing:
>
> http://blog.wolfram.com/2008/11/18/surprise-mathematica-70-released-today/
>
> Mathematica today in comparsion to all other existing langs, can be
> perhaps compared to how lisp was to other langs in the say 1980s:
> Quite far beyond all.
>
> Seeing how lispers today still talking about how to do basic list
> processing with its unusable cons, and how they get giddy with 1980's
> macros (as opposed to full term rewriting), and still lack pattern
> matching, one feels kinda sad.
>
> see also:
>
> • Fundamental Problems of Lisp
>  http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/lisp_problems.html
>
>  Xah
> ∑ http://xahlee.org/
>
> ☄
> --
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
>
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