zlacker

>>nsoonh+(OP)
Maybe with the power of a supercomputer, Mathematica can finally launch in less than 30s. I have no idea how a software that still does essentially the same thing as it did in 1988 can be that sluggish.

>>fsh+y7
Yet there is hardly any computing system that can replicate Mathematica tooling capabilities.

One would expect 37 years would be enough to create such alternative.

Jupiter notebooks aren't the same.

>>pjmlp+R7
Sage Math? Though I admit, unlike homogeneous Mathematica, it's just a Python glue on multiple smaller projects of different quality and poorly integrated. I wish there was something more like the Wolfram software but there isn't.

>>xvilka+u8
I quite like Sage. Python is a much better language than Wolfram (yes, he named it after himself...). In Wolfram, there is no real scoping (even different notebooks share all variables, Module[] is incredibly clumsy), no real control flow (If[] is just a function), and no real error handling. When Wolfram encounters an exception, it just prints a red message and keeps chugging along with the output of the error'd function being replaced by a symbolic expression. This usually leads to pages and pages of gibberish and/or crashes the kernel (which for some reason is quite difficult to interrupt or restart). Together with the notebook format and the laughable debugger, this makes finding errors extremely frustrating.

The notebooks are also difficult to version control (unreadable diffs for minor changes), and unit testing is clearly just an afterthought. Also the GUI performance is bad. Put more than a hand full of plots on a page, and everything slows to a crawl. What keeps me coming back is the comprehensive function library, and the formula inputs. I find it quite difficult to spot mistakes in mathematical expressions written in Python syntax.

>>fsh+2a
This is not true. Mathematica has the concept of contexts. You can have each notebook have it's own unique context. Mathematica Packages create their own context too, we are not talking about module's here which are useful for local variable scoping. Packages and contexts lead to the isolation you are looking for. These are things that have been around since the initial Mathematica 1.0 in 1988 (!). https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/Context.html

Same about your criticism of error handling and control flow: https://reference.wolfram.com/language/guide/RobustnessAndEr...