Re: the necessity of Lisp's Objects?

Xah Lee wrote:
> «Mathematica comes with a thousand (or few thousands) of built in
> functions (and high-quality ones, not just web collection of Joes like
> Perl's CPAN).»
> 
> Do you mean to say, that because the problems you encountered above,
> you refute my assertion in my original message's context, that in
> general Mathematica comes with few thousands built-in functions/
> libraries that are high quality?

Yes. I used Mathematica for many years and uncovered many serious bugs.
I've
used OCaml for longer and uncovered no serious bugs at all. So I would say
that Mathematica does indeed have a large standard library, as you say,
but
it is not high-quality.

>> My PhD was largely on wavelets so I obtained Wolfram Research's own
>> ($595!) WaveletExplorer add-on only to discover that they deal solely
>> with discrete wavelets and completely ignore continuous wavelets. I
>> suggested they change the name to DiscreteWaveletExplorer and
>> commercialized my own Mathematica library as an alternative:
>>
>>  http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/CWT/?xl
> 
> Maybe if you kissed people's ass in your attitudes, they might sell
> your package by now. This is the key to business Jon.

If offered to sell the package to WRI for £10k but they weren't
interested.
Mathematica has so few users (e.g. compared to MATLAB) that Mathematica
libraries are not commercially viable. I've contacted several other
vendors
and they all drew the same conclusion: Mathematica libraries just don't
sell.

In contrast, I've started writing C# and F# libraries and they not only
sell
comparatively well but there is a lot of low-hanging fruit on .NET.

>> The last useful functionality of Mathematica for me was graphics but
>> Smoke is orders of magnitude faster, built upon a better language and
>> completely free:
>>
>>  http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/smoke_vector_graphics/?xl
> 
> I looked at the your site. It seems smoke is a 2D vector graphics lib.
> 2D! Jesus, 2D graphics libs are a dime a dozen today. There's flash,
> and there's interactive geometry softwares, literally dozens of them,
> free. There are also easy to use dedicated langs for 2D graphics/
> animation. Have a whiff of my website:
> 
> http://xahlee.org/PageTwo_dir/MathPrograms_dir/plane_geometry.html

None of them sup****t high-performance rendering at arbitrary zoom as Smoke
already does. Try replicating our tiger demo in any of those other
systems,
for example.

> Since we share interest in graphics programing. I have a question. I'm
> looking for easy-to-use, 3D library that allows me to do live rotation
> and animation. Any suggestion you have?

F# for Visualization is the gold standard:

  http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/fsharp_for_visualization/?xl

;-)

-- 
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?u