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Re: Mathematica and Lisp

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg129692] Re: Mathematica and Lisp
• From: Alex Krasnov <akrasnov at eecs.berkeley.edu>
• Date: Mon, 4 Feb 2013 22:23:02 -0500 (EST)
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On Sun, 3 Feb 2013, John Doty wrote:

> All non-trivial software has bugs.

Although this statement is somewhere between meaningless and false, the 
primary issue is not with the presence of bugs in Mathematica but rather 
with the frequency of bugs as compared to that for programs of similar 
complexity. Frankly, the effort is better expended on correcting the issue 
than on arguing about it.

> To you, Mathematica is mysterious, because you fight it rather than 
> using it.

I have been using Mathematica for solving a practical problem for several 
months and am quite happy with it overall. However, it is already obvious 
from personal experience and numerous reports on this list that quality 
control at Wolfram Research is at best severely lacking.

> I've been using Mathematica to do practical work since version 1, and 
> I've never encountered a bug in its numerics.

Surely, you must be joking.

Alex