top | item 47131085

(no title)

skolos | 7 days ago

I like Mathematica and use it regularly. But I did not see any benefits of using it over python as a tool that Claude Code can use. Every script it produced in wolfram was slower with worse answers than python. Wolfram people are really trying but so far the results are not very good.

discuss

order

mr_mitm|7 days ago

Back when I was using it, mathematica was unmatched in its ability to find integrals. Has python caught up there?

currymj|7 days ago

sympy is good enough for typical uses. the user interface is worse but that doesn't matter to Claude. I imagine if you have some really weird symbolic or numeric integrals, Mathematica may have some highly sophisticated algorithms where it would have an edge.

however, even this advantage is eaten away somewhat because the models themselves are decent at solving hard integrals.

bandrami|7 days ago

It's symbolics capabilities are still really good, though in my totally subjective opinion not as good as Maxima's.

ai-christianson|7 days ago

What do you think the problem is?

owyn|7 days ago

I think the problem is just not enough training on that specific language because it's proprietary. Most useful Mathematica code is on someone's personal computer, not GitHub. They can build up a useful set of training data, some benchmarks, a contest for the AI companies to score high on, because they do love that kind of thing.

But for most internet applications (as opposed to "math" stuff) I would think Python is still a better language choice.