AJAX Version of Mathematica Coming

stoolpigeon writes "The O'Reilly School of Technology is teaming up with Wolfram Research to provide on-line math courses using an AJAX version of Mathematica. O'Reilly has posted an and interview with Scott Gray, the director of OST, that has more details on the program (named Hilbert after David Hilbert) itself as well as the classes they will be offering."

Sage also has a web interface

[k2enemy]

Sage [sagemath.org] also has an AJAX interface [flickr.com].

I've been making an effort to use Sage in place of Mathematica lately and so far I'm impressed. Although, right now I prefer using the CLI rather than the web interface.

Re:Matlab

[caffeinemessiah]

You mean Matlab isn't considered the best? I kid, I kid.

Kid you may, but Mathematica is a computer algebra system, which means its good at manipulating symbolic mathematics. Matlab is primarily used for vector/matrix manipulation and is more engineering-oriented. I wish people would realize that in spite of the many commonalities (including the prefix "Mat"), they are different products with different uses and audiences.

Re:Hmm...

[stoolpigeon]

If I understand your point - I think you are missing an important piece of information. It was not previously a web app.

Re:Sage also has a web interface

[Garridan]

Actually, it's an AJ interface. Nobody actually uses XML. I think it's great -- of course, I'm one of the primary developers, so I've made it work pretty much how I like it. There are still some issues with it, but it's well over a year old, and pretty stable at this point. During the joint AMA/AMS meeting in San Diego, Eric Wesstein came up to the Sage booth, and said that he'd copied a bunch of stuff from Sage when he was working on the Combinatorica package. Now, it looks like they've copied a bunch of my ideas, too!

I think this is a beautiful thing. When William Stein started Sage, he wanted to beat Magma. Soon thereafter, he decided that he'd need to catch up to Mathematica. Now, less than 3 years later, they're racing to catch up to us...

Re:Are you kidding?

[Garridan]

Or, you could use a computer algebra system [sagemath.org] which has easy-to-use distributed computation [sagemath.org] built in already. Oh, did I mention, it's open source, so every single point above (with possible exception of software updates) is completely invalidated?

SageMath

[pablodiazgutierrez]

The open source mathematic software compendium Sage already has something similar that you can test right away in SageNB [sagenb.org]. Interestingly, one of the possible backends is Mathematica.

Re:Sage also has a web interface

[Garridan]

He admitted to copying ideas, not code. Sorry to get your hopes up. ;)

Re:Is my documentation worthless?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

When I had to start using Mathematica for my courses, ....

Had to, or were too lazy to go without?

Mathematica is a blight upon the scientific world. The price is outrageous, the code is closed source and the learning curve never stops rising. The thing is like some kind of religious oracle; arcane, totally inscrutable, and regarded by almost everyone as infallible. Did I mention the price?

It would be nice to see an open source, scrutable and affordable counterpart to Mathematica. Something like GNU Octave is to Matlab. Looks like it's never going to happen though. Maxima, Sage and Axiom all fail to make the grade, and have infuriating names besides. The situation is less and less likely to change as people who "have" to use Mathematica in their courses keep entrenching the thing deeper and deeper.

Did I mention the price?

Mathematica suxxor

[Fred 0101010011]

Too bad for those who must, by some reason, use Mathematica... It is probably the biggest mystery of a software of all times, for instance, the code syntax used are unique to Mathematica and a complete mess, it doesn't make sense at all and reminds me of no other language. Wolfram Is also the evil empire I have heard, treating their customers incredibly inappropriate. I used Mathematica for a project... I ended up wanted to smash my keyboard mainy due to the idiotic-style coding and the general moron-behavior of Mathematica's front end... then I tried Maple - and since then I'll never touch Mathematica again. Avoid Mathematica at all cost - use Maple or some free alternative.