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Mathematica 6

JacquesC 2396
May 03 2007
0
I got spammed by Wolfram, touting their new Mathematica 6. Being the curious person that I am, I went over to take a look. First: their marketing material is slick. Very slick. It makes you think that they've invented some nifty new stuff -- until you look just a bit more and realize that some of it has been in Maple for ages. And some of these ideas were invented by Maplesoft, and yet Wolfram markets them better. Very devious - and I am sure will be very successful with a lot of customers! Second: it's good. It looks like it warrants the major upgrade hoopla. The new features are very tightly integrated. I mean, in the case of Mathematica, the language and the user interface are now one-and-the-same. You can programmatically access the whole interface (live!), and you can use interface components in any program. This is going to give Maple 11 some serious competition. Ok, so their marketing makes it sound like they've just hit a home-run, and it's not. But it probably is a solid double, and with their marketing strength, they might even be able to steal third base. It'll make for an exciting game. The IDE features look good (automatic coloured syntax highlighting and built-in code analysis, yum!). The built-in data sources (of all sorts) look handy. The graphics upgrade, especially some of the 3D stuff, is stunning. Their programmatic table-creation (in fact, any GUI component creation) looks useful. Well, now I know what to look forward to in Maple 12 and 13.
graph interface

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