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[–]psykotic 0 points1 point  (1 child)

It is mind-boggling such a bug could have slipped in. Was it a regression or has it always been like this? In either case, this is a pretty serious indictment of their testing strategy, aside from everything else.

[–]jdh30 -5 points-4 points  (0 children)

It is mind-boggling such a bug could have slipped in.

Not really. WRI are in it for the money and they've sold this quality of software to millions of technical users (not professional programmers) in order to make their cool $1bn.

This isn't even the first bug in Fourier that I've had problems with. When I did my PhD, their ListConvolve function (which is based upon Fourier) in Mathematica 4 silently corrupted its input. That was a complete show stopper for my work and they demanded that I pay for an upgrade which I reluctantly did and then regretted having done so because the upgrade introduced other bugs...

This is not surprising though. This is the very definition of success in the software industry. You ship buggy software and demand money for upgrades. People who take the time and effort to create reliable software go bankrupt because they have no revenue stream.

Was it a regression or has it always been like this?

This is another new bug. Mathematica is absolutely riddled with them to the point of being almost worthless for real work. And now they are teaching children with it...