Mathematica 7 Released

By Xah Lee. Date: 2008-12-01

Wolfram Research's Mathematica Version 7 has just been released. See: http://www.wolfram.com/products/mathematica/index.html .

Among it's marketing material, it has a section on how mathematica compares to competitors. See http://www.wolfram.com/products/mathematica/analysis/. And on this page, there are sections where Mathematica is compared to programing langs, such as C, C++, Java, and research langs Lisp, ML, …, and scripting langs Python, Perl, Ruby…

Note: I'm not affiliated with Wolfram Research Inc.

Stephen Wolfram has a blog entry about Mathematica 7. http://blog.wolfram.com/2008/11/18/surprise-mathematica-70-released-today/. Quite amazing.

Mathematica today in comparison to all other existing langs, can be perhaps compared to how lisp was to other langs in the say 1980s: Quite far beyond all.

Seeing how lispers today still talking about how to do basic list processing with its unusable cons, and how they get giddy with 1980's macros (as opposed to full term rewriting), and still lack pattern matching, one feels kinda sad.

2008-12