On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 9:37 PM, mhampton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I used to really enjoy writing programs in mathematica, but maybe I'm > a strange person. I only stopped in order to force myself to get > fluent with Sage. I think it just depends on your background, what > you are used to, and what you want to do. For symbolic calculations > and programming I still miss mathematica quite often. > > -M. Hampton > > On Aug 20, 12:59 am, "Fernando Perez" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 1:05 PM, Ondrej Certik <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> > but >> > programming in Mathematica is not fun. >> >> And that would be the understatement of the week.
I don't think you're strange, I was just joking a bit. Caveat: it's been years that I've *programmed* in Mathematica in a serious way (recently I've mostly used it as a fancy calculator for quickly computing integrals I'm too lazy to do by hand). But having said that, what I really found Mathematica programming to be was a very mixed experience: certain things that should be easy were unjustifiably tricky to achieve, even after consulting with local hard-core gurus. But the elegance with which you can manipulate expressions *structurally* is truly something to behold. This comes courtesy of the lisp-like facilities you have for accessing any entity, working on it as an expression tree you can manipulate with very powerful transformation rules. And there are classes of problems where that approach allows you to get pretty much exactly the solution you're after with a minimum amount of fuss, where as in more conventional languages it would be a lot of work. So there, I hope this is a slightly more reasoned reply to a topic worthy of an honest answer ;) Cheers, f --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
