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Work on Basic Mathematica Stephen!

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  • Subject: [mg130766] Work on Basic Mathematica Stephen!
  • From: "djmpark" <djmpark at comcast.net>
  • Date: Sun, 12 May 2013 03:28:56 -0400 (EDT)
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(I've renamed this and started a new thread because my reply is not exactly
to the question.)

Oh, what a wonderful Wolfram blog! Earlier Stephen hinted at Mathematica as
an iPhone app. Now it's data mining Facebook data (Gee I wonder if
Zuckerberg has thought of that? He might be able to develop a great business
model.) Can Twitter be far behind? There are many significant mathematical
equations that will fit into 64 characters - or whatever the limit is.
Ramanujan would probably have done well on Twitter. And women are more
interested in personal relationships and men are more interested in sports?
Who would have thought? The average person on Facebook has 342 friends! Well
there are friends and there are friends. Montaigne wrote that his friendship
with Etienne de La Bo=E9tie was such that "So many coincidences are needed to
build [it up] that it is a lot if fortune can do it once in three
centuries." One might say, ephemera in ephemera out.

For the dwindling few of us who still have desktop computers and large
screens, or maybe two large screens, who are interested in learning or doing
some extended mathematics, and the even fewer who would like to write
literate Mathematica notebooks as technical documents, I wonder if Stephen
could find some time to attend to basic Mathematica, fixing its problems and
fulfilling its vision?

Mathematica lacks stability. Things that worked fine in one version don't
work in the next. Especially troubling to me is the basic user interface.
This got much worse in Version 9 with outright bugs that are in your face
all the time. For example: often if I click in an existing Input cell and do
a line return the Messages window opens with a contact WRI if this happens
message. Or if one clicks after a word in a Text like cell and uses Ctrl+K
for spell checking the message window again opens with a similar message. I
like to use spell check a lot so this is especially annoying to me. I don't
see why WRI couldn't have fixed these problems by now. (Or introduced an
actually useful feature to spell check a selection such as a Text cell or a
Section.)

The Version 9 command completion feature, which used to be great, no longer
works well. I have turned off the auto completion feature but what is left
still does not work as well as the Version 8 behavior.  For example, if one
types:

Carm

and then uses Ctrl+K to complete the command, there is only one choice,
CarmichaelLambda. In Mathematica 8 the symbol would be automatically completed and the cursor would be left at the end of the word. But now it brings up a menu,
even though there is only one choice, and one must click the menu. But you
are not finished yet! No there is another menu (somewhat displaced so you
may miss it), which is the equivalent of Ctrl+Shift+K and which we could
have done if we wanted, so one must by-pass that by clicking at the end of
CarmichaelLambda to get back to the normal typing entry. That's two extra
clicks added. You might say that's not much, but when it's at the basic
entry point for material in a notebook it is a lot.

One has to wonder how many parsers there are in Mathematica for kernel,
front end, packages, workbench and how their behavior shifts around between
versions? Can one copy and paste an expression without its underlying
representation changing? I suspect this may be a nagging underlying source
of instability.

I realize and appreciate that WRI continues to add new capabilities to
Mathematica and this inevitably results in learning and stability problems.
There could be better design efforts on these things and more professional
testing so the designs would stick and work well.  Progress might be slower
but it would be surer.

Doing mathematics is not social media. It's not done that well on an iPad.
And iPhone, iPad technology is not necessarily appropriate for Mathematica.
People do not want to scroll two 25" screens with their hands. Just ask
Microsoft.

Mathematics and Mathematica are intrinsically difficult enough as it is.
That makes it all the more important that WRI present users with a stable,
robust, easy to use basic interface. WRI had not done the best job they
could at this and not what one would expect for a relatively expensive
product.


David Park
djmpark at comcast.net
http://home.comcast.net/~djmpark/index.html


From: r.b.nachbar at gmail.com [mailto:r.b.nachbar at gmail.com]


I'm interested in making word cloud graphics, as demonstrated in the recent
Wolfram Blog post
http://blog.wolfram.com/2013/04/24/data-science-of-the-facebook-world/ (near
the end of the post). Does anyone have a function that will do this?

Thanks,

Bob
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