I Wrote a Book to Teach the Wolfram Language
blog.stephenwolfram.com
I Wrote a Book to Teach the Wolfram Language
1–10 of 66 posts
Re: I Wrote a Book to Teach the Wolfram Language
#2Direct link to book [because it's not all that obvious]:
[HTML]: http://www.wolfram.com/language/elementary-introduction/
Re: I Wrote a Book to Teach the Wolfram Language
#3[deleted]
Re: I Wrote a Book to Teach the Wolfram Language
#4Beautiful! Much as I dislike Stephen's self-aggrandizing style of presentation, it would be lovely to be taught this way. It (the language and environment) is functional, has real examples that readily lend themselves to visualization, has extensive databases of useful real world data ... there's no wasting time on pointer arithmetic or reversing strings.
Re: I Wrote a Book to Teach the Wolfram Language
#5...if only S. Wolfram would finally have the most obvious insight that he's totally missing:
Open-source it! The only programming languages that will ever succeed from now on will be the open source ones. Yeah, he can keep special-purpose libraries closed-source. And the server-software behind Wolfram. Maybe even the Mathematica GUI if he also offers a free "community version" or something on the side. But otherwise this will just not work. But the core language and core engine must be open-source with a liberal MIT or BSD license for it to ever grow an ecosystem around it.
Even Microsoft gets it now (with C# and many other stuff)! Apple also gets this with Swift! Typesafe gets it with Scala. Even Oracle partially got it in a twisted way, by allowing things like OpenJDK to exist!
Really, Mathematica and Wolfram seem wonderful tools, but probably as many as 10x the number of paying users would start to use them and contribute to their development (and most of them would also pay for "pro versions",trust me), if only they had an open-source core...
But it's probably too late and any future scientific computing platform will be built around Python and Julia and all the great work done by Wolfram Software will simply be forgotten because they simply don't grok how "business growth" and "software ecosystems" work in the 21st century...
Re: I Wrote a Book to Teach the Wolfram Language
#6[deleted]
Re: I Wrote a Book to Teach the Wolfram Language
#7...if only S. Wolfram would finally have the most obvious insight that he's totally missing: Open-source it! The only programming languages that will ever succeed from now on will be the open source ones . Yeah, he can keep special-purpose libraries closed-source. And the server-software behind Wolfram. Maybe even the Mathematica GUI if he also offers a free "community version" or something on the side. But otherwise…
[deleted]
Re: I Wrote a Book to Teach the Wolfram Language
#8Just me or does that guy seem to lack humility, I don't know something about the way he wrote that.
Re: I Wrote a Book to Teach the Wolfram Language
#9Just me or does that guy seem to lack humility, I don't know something about the way he wrote that.
Read http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/ to know more about him, or at least how he is perceived by other people.
Re: I Wrote a Book to Teach the Wolfram Language
#10Just me or does that guy seem to lack humility, I don't know something about the way he wrote that.
It's not just you. Browse through the 372 reviews of A New Kind of Science on Amazon!