That is nice! It even kind-of works with GeoGraphics:

GeoGraphics[{Point[GeoPosition[{1, 1}]], 
  CalloutPrimitive["here", {1.1, 1.1}, {1, 1}]}, 
 GeoRange -> {{0, 2}, {0, 2}}]

although it has trouble with options:

GeoGraphics[{Point[GeoPosition[{1, 1}]], 
  CalloutPrimitive["here", {1.1, 1.1}, {1, 1}, 
   Background -> Lighter@Orange, Appearance -> "Balloon"]}, 
 GeoRange -> {{0, 2}, {0, 2}}]

Unfortunately GeoListPlot does not seem to accept Callout.

It might be more tricky when ParametricPlot returns a surface(region, area) when you have 2 parameters, and it is therefore omitted. Plot, ListPlot, ListLogPlot all have a list of Wrappers they support. Notice that ParametricPlot does not have such a list:

I agree that it should be added, but as of now I don't think they claim they do...

Unfortunately there is not (yet) a callout graphics primitive that you could easily add as an Epilog/Prolog... But Show works fine and is not a 'serious inconvenience'.

Szabolcs, I would be interested in knowing what, for you personally, the primary usage of Mathematica is? And what, in your wide connections in the Mathematica world, do you see as the actual major usage for other users?

For myself, I see Mathematica not so much as a super graphical calculator or as a programming language (although it is in part these things) but as a medium on which I can learn, develop and communicate ideas in mathematics, physics, chemistry, engineering and science in general, for myself and with other people. I look on a Mathematica notebook as a blank piece of paper on which I'm writing text, equations, axioms, derivations, algorithms and specifications for various graphics and dynamic presentations. These kind of documents are orders of magnitude better than the major publication media used today.

I don't understand why Mathematica has many of the features it does if this was not a major intended usage. Why styled notebooks with Titles and Sectional groupings? Why all the dynamics if you're the only one who is going to look at it? A very nice feature in Version 11 is the immediate spell checking. But why have this if you're not writing for others? I would be convinced that WRI had succeeded if I saw Mathematica notebooks or notebooks backed by applications on http://arxiv.org/.

I could go on and on, but basically I think WRI should better perfect this usage, give more support to people trying to use it, and give more realistic promotion to it.

A software company I worked for years ago had a triage policy about bugs. Some were so critical they were fixed immediately. Less critical ones were fixed in the next release. Some were regarded as being sufficiently insignificant that they were never fixed. I don't know Wolfram Research's policy but I suspect it is similar.

It sounds that it could be the case, although, sometimes, the judgment of the strategists about the supposed best corporation strategy or policy to implement does not fit exactly what the market is willing to accept. The key concept is the evaluation of that referred to as "less critical",

Mutatis mutandis, the policy what you call a 'triage' policy is well known and widely used in many fields, and it is called the «Tombstone Philosophy», «Tombstone Mentality», «Tombstone Strategy», «Tombstone Technology»..., depending on the field it is exploited.

There is a lot of literature on the subject and its drawbacks.

And again mutatis mutandis, its application has costed the survival to some well known and very powerful companies.

You statement is much too subjective. What is a "small number"? What is a "small bug"?

Regardless, it seems to me that the majority of people who actually use Mathematica for critical work would clearly choose fewer functions and fewer bugs than what we have since about M10.0. I hear this again and again and I wholeheartedly agree with the opinion. Mathematica has expanded much too fast, and this had too great a cost in quality. There's a lot of functionality which seems not quite ready to use, and just doesn't get fixed.

What about units? They're extremely slow, simply unusable for real work.

What about all the curated data? The functions are so slow that usually it's better to just google up the data and import separately.

Import had issues which were partly fixed by SemanticImport but SemanticImport is again unusably slow for large data. What if you have to write your own parser for a file format? Interpreter seems excellent, but again it's unusably slow. I admit that the type of work I do with Mathematica may bias me, but I find it difficult to see how features like Interpreter and all the cloud stuff that it's meant to be used for are worth the effort. I don't know anyone who uses Mathematica and needs this for their work. But I constantly see the need to implement our own importers.

There are still many bugs where Mathematica returns wrong results with no warning and they just aren't fixed in new versions. There are plenty of examples in the graph theory functionality.

R/Link is an excellent tool, and clearly a lot of work went into it. But it has problems that make it difficult and painful to use in practice. Just think about using your own R installation, which is absolutely critical, yet still unsupported. After the first release, all work seems to have stopped. Compared to what R/Link already does, just a little more work would be needed to make it practically useful, but once a feature is released, it seems the priority is not to make it practically usable, but to add even more features.

I don't want stuff that's just good enough for a tweet-a-program demonstration. I want stuff that is of high enough quality and performant enough that it helps me in my daily work.

Just to avoid any misunderstandings: I think it is a very good thing that Mathematica is expanding in this direction. It seems to me that most use of M hasn't been primarily symbolic for many years. Machine learning, neural networks, better numerics, statistics, etc. all these are very welcome.

What I and many others don't think is a good thing is adding too many functions too quickly. There should be more focus on quality. Although a bit early to judge, it seems that the 11.0 release was better in this regard that the v10 release.

Features like curated data and cloud forms I don't see any use for. There may be a world parallel to what I know where people welcome these features but I don't know anyone who uses them. Actually I would welcome curated data if only it weren't unusably slow. Several minutes to download a 1-2 megabytes is not really acceptable.

P.S. In the lab where I work now no one else uses Mathematica. Everyone uses R, and several use Python. Some people know a bit of MATLAB, but don't really use it.

A friend of mine e-mailed me that a list of programming languages by popularity showed Mathematica far down the list and that google trends showed that Mathematica is losing ground compared to MATLAB.

Last night I was looking at ranking lists of programming languages. I have been trying to decide if I should focus only on Mathematica or learn Python SymPy using a Continuum Anaconda Python (re)installation. I was surprised to discover Mathematica does not even make the top 48. Here is the 2016 IEEE Spectrum ranking list. Here is the StatisticsTimes page with 4 different ranking lists. Each of these different ranking lists measure popularity using different metrics.

PYPL has 3 tables on StatisticsTimes, Worldwide, USA and India. MATLAB is more popular in India than in the USA. MATLAB jumped 7 notches in India from Sep 2015 to Sep 2016. MATLAB is expensive to use, even for Home Users. With all of the toolboxes required for math, statistics, etc..., the cost would be $680.

Python is always in the top 5. The advantage of Python is all of the packages are always being updated. It is also free of course. The disadvantage is it is text-based. The mathematics don't look very "math-like." They look awful. Maxima is also free.

One could probably say that Mathematica is a language for people who what to get things done, but who don't want to be programmers. I would have no idea how to quantify that type of user.

That is exactly why I am using Mathematica 10.0.2. I don't want to take a lot of time programming, dealing with coding, pointers, sorting, etc, etc... I want to get things done, fast.

I am considering upgrading to Mathematica 11.0.0. However, after dealing with Mathematica 10.0.1, I don't know if I should. Please see my "Stability of Mathematica 11.0.0?" question I posted today.

Put me in the "fewer functions and no bugs" category as well. Being a programming language, I can always add functionality that I need. Granted, I may introduce some bugs, but I have control over them.

I have suggested to people at Wolfram that it would be a great idea to have a major -- or even a .1 release -- that was nothing but a bug-fix release.

Hi,

Before even trying the recent version 11, I would need to know whether the following bugs have been fixed :

1) Graphs with multiple edges and problems with edges layouts and colouring

In fact, this is a direct question to Szabolcs Horvat, since he knows well the multiple edges issue and, I guess, can give a definitive answer.

http://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/603839?ppauth=5D8cHSgm

2) Problems with 'Hyperlink["label",("notebook.nb"',"celltag"}]

http://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/840952?ppauth=5D8cHSgm

Thank you

Martin.

Advice to pre-release testers. In order to use the activation code for version 11 from the user portal, you'll need to delete the pre-release versions from your license file. If you don't, the activation code will not be asked for and your license will remain as the pre-release license.

Or -- You just use the menu item and enter the new activation code. You can delete the old one if you like, but it is not necessary.

You can check to see if the activation is yours or the pre-release by looking at About Wolfram Mathematica. If the Registered name is your name, then you have successfully entered your activation code. If it is (still) Arnoud Buzing (sp??), you need to enter your activation key using the Help/Enter Activation Key… menu item. You get the key itself from your user portal.

If you ever look at the file that contains the activation keys (use a text editor), it can have lots of keys. Mathematica uses the first on in the list that 'works'.

It would have been nice if they had told the pre-release testers about the menu item.

Example 1:

But

In[1]:= Sum[Floor[5/5^k], {k, 0, \[Infinity]}]

Out[1]= 6

In[2]:= Sum[Floor[5/5^k + 10^-1000000], {k, 1, \[Infinity]}]

Out[2]= 1

The bug is because of Sum[] function:

In[3]:= Table[Floor[5/5^k], {k, 1, 10}]

Out[3]= {1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0}

Yes!

Are you a 'prerelease'-tester (beta-tester)? If not, perhaps you can sign up; send them an email prerelease@wolfram.com I'd bet they would have liked to know about this before release. They intend to resume the prerelease program for version 11.1

From my experience: they respond much faster to problems found in beta-versions...

These are not regressions. They were known before, as I remember several of these examples from StackExchange. I think what Mariusz meant was that even though these were known problems, they were still not fixed in version 11.

To be fair, I should note that my subjective impression was that symbolic math related bugs like these got fixed with higher frequency than other problems. This is based on going through a few random bugs-tagged questions on StackExchange and seeing which got fixed.

I was missing this plot, that always shows up at every release...

    funcs = WolframLanguageData[];
    versions = WolframLanguageData[funcs, "VersionIntroduced"];
    out = SortBy[Tally[versions], First];
    out[[All, 2]] = Accumulate[out[[All, 2]]];
    out = {#1, {If[IntegerQ[#1], 100, 50], #2}} & @@@ out;
    blue = RGBColor[0.37, 0.51, 0.71];
    cols = If[IntegerQ[#], blue, Lighter[blue]] & /@ out[[All, 1]];
    RectangleChart[Labeled[#2, Rotate[#1, \[Pi]/4], Below] & @@@ out, 
     BarSpacing -> 0, ImageSize -> 600, ChartStyle -> cols, Frame -> True,
      GridLines -> Automatic, 
     FrameTicks -> {{Automatic, Automatic}, {None, None}}]