This might be a good place to demo the language, assuming it is meant to be general purpose:
Starting to Demo the Wolfram Language [video]
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Re: Starting to Demo the Wolfram Language [video]
#42This seems like they have essentially codified wolfram alpha's many APIs and created the biggest, baddest standard library any language has ever seen, and slapped on some functions to access everything with. It seems like the wolfram language essentially sits on abstraction level max-1 which is pretty amazing. I wonder how things break down when you don't want to do something that can be perfectly described in existi…
> This seems like they have essentially codified wolfram alpha's many APIs and created the biggest, baddest standard library any language has ever seen, and slapped on some functions to access everything with.
Yes! I couldn't have said it better!
Re: Starting to Demo the Wolfram Language [video]
#43I'm working on something akin to this, although my version is somewhat more ambitious[1]. So far I have a "Knowledge Engine" that can answer (some) questions in natural language by using a process similar to how IBM Watson Deep QA works (an extremely simplified version atm, though). I'm currently working on integrating SymPy for symbolic calculation[2]. SymPy already has a web interface[3] which is broadly similar to…
How do you represent queries? That's really, for me, the most interesting question.
I run multiple parsing strategies in parallel. One is based on Quepy[1] (which generates a parse graph, then runs RegEx on the parsed objects), and a simple thing I wrote using a combination of NLTK and a Java processing thing.
For "question answering" (the bit I have working) both end up being converted into SPARQL queries and then run against a local RDF store.
For SymPy the idea is that my frontline parallel pipeline thing will throw the query at SymPy as well as the other parsers, but SymPy will be the only thing that knows what to do with it.
Re: Starting to Demo the Wolfram Language [video]
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for the comprehensive answer! I phrased the question poorly, in that I didn't intend to suggest running Mathmatica against its own codebase but rather against shorter end-user programs with a view to developing IDE-type addons. I agree with your general comments, as I hate writing glue code and my interest is primarily for DSP and simulation applications, for which I already admire it.
Whoops, sounds like you already know exactly what I spent 3/4 of my post belaboring :) I'm still not sure I understand your proposal. How do short IDE-type addons solve the problem of integrating siloed codebases with each other? The way I see it, the only way forward is 1. Convince a language person that first-class support for algebraic metaprogramming is important 2. Convince someone from each of the fields {numer…
I'm very into flow-based programming because I use a fair bit of it for audio DSP and that's how I think. So these days when I look at code-as-text I often find myself thinking about how I'd like to see the functions, branding etc. abstracted out into a flow chart diagram automatically. I was just struck during the Demo (and from some previous explorations) at how good M. is at developing graphs from structural information, and I think to myself 'why not from code?'.
On a tangential note, this latest demo looks very very close to the sort of thing Bret Victor has been talking about over the last year or two (http://worrydream.com). If you haven't checked it out I think it might be interesting to you.
Re: Starting to Demo the Wolfram Language [video]
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
What happens if you run it on itself - eg you do some sort of basic program with a little bit of structure and generate code from it, and then analyze the code, eg to make a graph of it (if that makes sense). Or to put it another way, what are the possibilities of making better tools Mathematica (or Wolfram Language or whatever it is called now) using Mathematica?
It would be slightly easier than coding Mathematica from scratch (you have better computers and an example to follow) but much harder to fund, since you would be re-treading old ground and wouldn't be able to competitive for a long time. The types of problems simplified by Mathematica don't include coding Mathematica. To be sure, it pioneered a few nifty techniques that you would want to take advantage of, especially…
"it shatters the barriers between analytic and numeric tools."
"and it handles the interface between the 2/3 and the 1/3 about 100x better than your typical programming language."
Thank you for that great word picture :D
Re: Starting to Demo the Wolfram Language [video]
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whoops, sounds like you already know exactly what I spent 3/4 of my post belaboring :) I'm still not sure I understand your proposal. How do short IDE-type addons solve the problem of integrating siloed codebases with each other? The way I see it, the only way forward is 1. Convince a language person that first-class support for algebraic metaprogramming is important 2. Convince someone from each of the fields {numer…
I'm very into flow-based programming because I use a fair bit of it for audio DSP and that's how I think. So these days when I look at code-as-text I often find myself thinking about how I'd like to see the functions, branding etc. abstracted out into a flow chart diagram automatically. I was just struck during the Demo (and from some previous explorations) at how good M. is at developing graphs from structural infor…
> why not from code?
We build networks of lots of different kinds against our own codebases and databases. And personally I've done a bunch of experiments around visualizing code in the past.
Unfortunately, I don't think I, or anyone else at the company, has convincingly cracked the problem yet. Generally, the visualizations look pretty, but they aren't "tactile" or practical enough to be useful.
But you've convinced me that it would be worth digging up some of my old experiments and writing a blog post around them, so that at least any progress I've made can be carried further by other people.
Re: Starting to Demo the Wolfram Language [video]
#47Ego Force One has taken off again :(
Ugh and he just had to say "it's a new kind of thing". No, it's not new. It's a very sophisticated implementation of some very old ideas. Surely that's impressive enough. Why wouldn't you cite the prior art??
Re: Starting to Demo the Wolfram Language [video]
#48I worked on Mathematica for 2 years, and really the biggest downside is how its an incredibly powerful tool that fails in many practical applications. It failed to power the backend of a search engine (Wolfram Alpha), and based on my latest version of Mathematica, the dynamic computing features, visualization, and JIT compilation features still have a long way to go. It's an incredible and fascinating tool when you'r…
The demo looked really cool. I doubt it's better than Lisp for doing symbolic computation though.
Re: Starting to Demo the Wolfram Language [video]
#49Wow! That is a helluva pitch. My fear is that it _is_ the mind of Stephen Wolfram and unless you have that the whole thing will be one big mystery.
Re: Starting to Demo the Wolfram Language [video]
#50This seems like they have essentially codified wolfram alpha's many APIs and created the biggest, baddest standard library any language has ever seen, and slapped on some functions to access everything with. It seems like the wolfram language essentially sits on abstraction level max-1 which is pretty amazing. I wonder how things break down when you don't want to do something that can be perfectly described in existi…
From my understanding, a big part of its intended usage is for interfacing from applications in other languages. So you can offload all of the difficult calculations from your C/Java/PHP program and get Wolfram to do the work.