I Wrote a Book to Teach the Wolfram Language

I'm wondering why they didn't opt for a purely functional language. That would make much more sense in a mathematical context, since the program text would then be much easier to reason about mathematically, and it would be much easier to treat programming constructs as first-class objects.

> ... because they simply don't grok how "business growth" and "software ecosystems" work in the 21st century...

Well, to be fair, Wolfram is one of the few scientists actually making money from scientific software. I've seen software companies doing much worse, to the point that I actually doubt there is any serious money to be made from most scientific/engineering software.

Going to have to join the, I don't quite get what Wolfram thinks is the big deal crowd:

> The goal of the book is to take people from zero to the point where they know enough about the Wolfram Language that they can routinely use it to create programs for things they want to do. And when I say “zero”, I really mean “zero”. This is a book for everyone.

One of the examples he gives is how to: Make a word cloud from the first letters of all the words:

     WordCloud[StringTake[WordList[], 1]]

OK, leaving aside the debate of whether word clouds are the text-analysis equivalent of a 3D rainbow donut chart, this simple example quickly leads to questions about how to express natural variations, such as a word cloud that is more spaced out. Or not shaped like a ball. Or how to render into something I can connect to my Twitter account so I can tweet out a cool viz. The tutorial treats the novice with the promise of doing very visual things in a seemingly more direct way -- what other language could generate a word cloud in so few commands? -- but...so? The power of programming, to me, is the ability to get into the details, to create something that uniqueness expresses something in my mind...and the trade off is that we start by learning syntax and abstract concepts (e.g. Loops and functions). Going past the non-trivial examples gets us quickly into the butting heads against the magic involved, and from first glance, the Wolfram syntax does not look particularly elegant for software design.

Sure, "Times[2,3]" might seem more human friendly than 2 * 3...until I get tired of writing that phrase out and doing an explicit function call just to get 2 numbers. But of course, in most software development, when am I really ever multiplying 2 numbers? Infrequently enough that I imagine I'll have to frequently Google whether the function name is "Times" or "Multiply", proving the first example of the classic adage about the 3 hardest things about computer science.

So there's a lot of things about the language that seem like a disaster to me, but I'm not smart enough to design my own language. Sometimes I'll take the opinions of the masses into account...for example, Python's use of significant white space seemed profoundly annoying but plenty of smart people are able to build profound things elegantly with it, so I took the jump. If Wolfram language is such a step beyond competing languages, where are the examples of things elegantly built with it?

Edit: apparently David Auerbach has said the things I think I want to say, but more eloquently http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/03/ste...

This is what 'dang famously described as a Pavlovian hashtable reflex[0].

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9722096

I really don't like the fact that he is forever hinting that higher level functions, such as recognizing an image of a cheetah, are (only) possible due to the unique omnipotent nature of the mathematica language.