zlacker

>>nsoonh+(OP)
Man, I miss Wolfram Language. Once you've twisted your brain a little to grok its usage, it's such an incredibly high-value tool, especially for exploration and prototyping. I saw it more as a do-anything software tool for researchers rather than as a language aimed at programmers, so I put on a researcher hat and tried to forget everything I knew as a professional programmer, and had a few memorable seasons with it around 2016-2020. I remember calculating precisely which days of the year would cause the sunlight to pass through a window and some glass blocks in an internal wall, creating a beautiful light show indoors. It only took a couple of minutes to get a nice animated visualisation and a calendar.

Nowadays I'd probably just ask Claude to figure it out for me, but pre LLMs, WL was the highest value tool for thought in my toolbox.

(Edit: and they actually offer perpetual licenses!)

>>hebeje+N8
> Nowadays I'd probably just ask Claude to figure it out for me

Incidentally, Mathematica + LLMs make a great combination. If you take what is pretty much the biggest mathematical routine library in the world and combine it with interactive visualization tools, and then use an LLM to accelerate things, it becomes an incredible tool. Almost ridiculously powerful for trying things out, teaching, visualizing things, etc.

(I've been using Mathematica since 1992 or so, so I'm familiar with the language, but it's still so much faster to just tell Claude to visualize this or that)