<story><title>Extending Van Gogh’s Starry Night with Inpainting</title><url>http://blog.wolfram.com/2014/12/01/extending-van-goghs-starry-night-with-inpainting/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>maho</author><text>Mathematica demos sure look pretty [0]. But I recently tried to get actual work done with Mathematica and found the experience utterly ridiculous.&lt;p&gt;The high level functions, while nice for demos, never quite do what you need. Want to display data vs. time with errorbars around the data? Sorry, no function for this completely exotic use case, please hack a DateListPlot on top of an ErrorListPlot [1].&lt;p&gt;The WolframAlpha integration &amp;quot;transparently&amp;quot; interprets code for you in the background. This interpretation can change any day [2] and leaves you guessing why your notebook doesn&amp;#x27;t run anymore.&lt;p&gt;The bugs I encountered were severe: One of the output function swallows the &amp;quot;-&amp;quot; sign if the result is between -1 and 0 [3]. Currently I am battling file corruption of notebooks that are saved on network drives and open while the drive is disattached&amp;#x2F;reattached.&lt;p&gt;Had it not been for the awesome support by the mathematica. stackexchange.com community, I would have quit Mathematica completely. Now I vowed to use it only for small hacks. And, if I want to impress someone, for demos.&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjCWdsrVcBM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=EjCWdsrVcBM&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/18962&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;mathematica.stackexchange.com&amp;#x2F;questions&amp;#x2F;18962&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] The input&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    Quantity[1, &amp;quot;Kelvins&amp;quot;]
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
is interpreted by Mathematica itself and yields an object equivalent to &amp;quot;1 Kelvins&amp;quot;. The input&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    Quantity[1, &amp;quot;Kelvin&amp;quot;]
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
however is interpreted &amp;quot;transparently&amp;quot; by Wolfram Alpha. A few weeks ago it evaluated to &amp;quot;1 KelvinsDifference&amp;quot;, but now has changed to &amp;quot;1 Kelvins&amp;quot;. Don&amp;#x27;t get me started on the KelvinsDifference vs. Kelvins thing, which are both represented by the same symbol to maximize your confusion when your unit conversions are failing...&lt;p&gt;[3] &lt;a href=&quot;http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/65600&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;mathematica.stackexchange.com&amp;#x2F;questions&amp;#x2F;65600&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Extending Van Gogh’s Starry Night with Inpainting</title><url>http://blog.wolfram.com/2014/12/01/extending-van-goghs-starry-night-with-inpainting/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jwise0</author><text>I wish that the Wolfram articles would describe a little more about what their algorithms do, rather than the mechanics of how to use their primitives.  The articles remind me some of the era of web engines optimized for a specific task -- there were plenty of MVC frameworks that work really really well for writing a todo list in 25 lines, but doing anything more complicated than a todo list meant dissecting the guts of the framework.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;d be great to hear how they did an efficient implementation of texture synthesis.  But if you want to read at least about the basics, the dissertation they linked [1] gets into the details on page 18, anyway, in section 2.2 (and beyond).&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.logarithmic.net/pfh-files/thesis/dissertation.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.logarithmic.net&amp;#x2F;pfh-files&amp;#x2F;thesis&amp;#x2F;dissertation.pdf&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>