Here’s the Deal

Idris vs Wolfram Mathematica

52 22

55 29

When comparing Idris vs Wolfram Mathematica, the Slant community recommends Idris for most people. In the question“What are the best (productivity-enhancing, well-designed, and concise, rather than just popular or time-tested) programming languages?” Idris is ranked 29th while Wolfram Mathematica is ranked 60th. The most important reason people chose Idris is:

Idris not only has support for type classes, but is a fully dependently typed language, giving you the full power to statically verify your code.

Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking

Common Questions

What are the best (productivity-enhancing, well-designed, and concise, rather than just popular or time-tested) programming languages?

Pros

Pro
Full dependent types

Idris not only has support for type classes, but is a fully dependently typed language, giving you the full power to statically verify your code.

Pro
Domain driven design and type driven development

Because of full dependent types in Idris, the programmer can focus more on modelling the domain with types and waste less time fixing common bugs that the type checker will catch. Dependent types help apply type driven development and a lot of code auto generation, making the compiler and type checker an ally in developing working software instead of just getting in the way.

Pro
Lots of functionality

Pro
Built-in CPU Parallelization

Pro
Very mature

Wolfram Mathematica has been around for a long time without any major changes in the basic design.

Pro
Coherent API over different domains

Pro
Supports units and can do much more than just maths

Other platforms severely lack this useful feature.

Pro
Fully integrated symbolic processing

Pro
Very powerful and fast, also possible to get for free

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Cons

Con
Not widely used

Con
Weaker type inference

As type inference is undecidable for dependently-typed languages, Idris cannot offer the full type inference that Haskell supports, and so more type annotations will be needed.

Con
Different semantics from Haskell

Idris, while similar to Haskell, has strict semantics, which may cause some confusion if your backend is done in Haskell. If using Idris, it would make sense to do the backend in Idris as well, if not for the fact that Idris currently has fewer libraries available for web development than Haskell.

Con
Unintuitive data types and strange assignment statements

Representation of data still remains highly fragmented technically and one fumbles between data types and stumbles on strange assignment statements to attempt conversions of meaning.