Lisp Machines are back! :)
Starting to Demo the Wolfram Language [video]
51–60 of 75 posts
Re: Starting to Demo the Wolfram Language [video]
#52This has been a very long time in coming. Here's Wolfram in a 1993 interview: "One of the things that I consider an exciting direction is to what extent we can expand the use of the language itself, independent of the application side of Mathematica. We've considered making a thing that will probably be called M, that is essentially Mathematica without the mathematics." http://www.stephenwolfram.com/media/stephen-wol…
You're right, I think. The language that's been at the centre of Mathematica for 25 years hasn't had a name of its own (it's just been "the language used in Mathematica"), but now it has its own name - the Wolfram Language. The Pi has an early pre-release version of version 10, whereas Mathematica is currently on version 9, and there are a number of additional features which will presumably be included in the release of Mathematica version 10.
Leaving aside the re-branding issues, it makes some sense for the language to have a separate name, because Wolfram intends for it to be used in web browsers and other places where there is no surrounding development environment (the Mathematica notebook and 'front end').
Re: Starting to Demo the Wolfram Language [video]
#53Wow! 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.
In the hands of an expert, genius, or wizard, Mathematica is very capable. But lesser mortals will struggle to make it do what they want, and it's never as easy as it looks here...
Re: Starting to Demo the Wolfram Language [video]
#54I 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.
It looks friendlier to most people. Like it or not, parenthesis scare people away.
Re: Starting to Demo the Wolfram Language [video]
#55Wow, nice demo. It is interesting to see Wolfram explain his vision for an "ultimate fusion language" -- a powerful multi-paradigm language, a huge standard library, data sources, and deployment all rolled into one. This monolithic approach seems to be the opposite of the Unix philosophy, and I wonder how that will play out. There are clearly benefits to be gained from smooth integration, and the demo is impressive c…
This was the Lisp and Smalltalk development environments philosophy which offered a better developer experience than UNIX ever did.
The little things together from UNIX was the functions and objects bundled together via the REPL, with added capability to dynamically change the environment.
Re: Starting to Demo the Wolfram Language [video]
#56First, as random internet commentator guy, I want to thank Stephen for his contribution here. This and NKS are incredible. Second, I keep seeing videos and articles about Wolfram Alpha and am always left scratching my head kinda going "WTF?" So it's a knowledge-based purely symbolic programming language? Can it play Flappy Bird? Power the next cool startup? Give me an answer to a question I might have today? I've bee…
I would say it is a matter of available libraries, deployment options and how fast can the generated code execute.
This type of systems is what I dream of, when I get my hands on old demos of the early Smalltalk and Lisp environments and try to imagine how would computing look like if those systems had gone mainstream.
Being super productive at high abstraction level, but exposing enough knobs to go down to the metal if one really needs to.
Oh well, dreaming is always possible.
Re: Starting to Demo the Wolfram Language [video]
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mathematica for handling data aggregation, recursive descent parsing, and tasks well suited for it, while the rest is an enormous codebase of compiled and JVM languages stitched together with Mathematica. Such projects are referred to as the "mud bowl", where when something breaks you just have to throw more mud at it.
> recursive descent parsing The parser is Java, actually. And it's not recursive descent. > tasks well suited for it Fancy that! Using a language for things it is well suited to! :) > compiled and JVM languages stitched together with Mathematica A lot of stuff is still WL though. Data curation, evaluation, scanning, typesetting, formatting, and, you know, the actual computation in doing something like http://www.wolf…
So, I'm curious, is that similar to what Wolfram Cloud will provide? To me, it sounds like a service that will run your Wolfram Language code in the cloud, just like Wolfram Alpha runs it in the cloud as part of its backend. Is that accurate?
Re: Starting to Demo the Wolfram Language [video]
#58This demo is pretty amazing and will take me a while to digest.
A few questions that I'm really interested in hearing the answer to:
1. Will the language work without an internet connection?
2. Will it be free to use?
3. What happens if/when Wolfram the company goes out of business, or Wolfram himself retires?
4. Are all the disparate APIs and sources that the language uses determined by fiat, or can they be customized? What happens if/when the APIs/sources stop working?
5. Given that the language can do things like query your Facebook graph, it seems like there's a lot of API upkeep that the language requires. Is this done by Wolfram? How does this work when I'm running locally (if this is even possible)?
Re: Starting to Demo the Wolfram Language [video]
#59How to run it? Is there any interpreter?
Re: Starting to Demo the Wolfram Language [video]
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> But you've convinced me that it would be worth digging up some of my old experiments and writing a blog post around them...
I would certainly be interested in seeing that. I have a lot of that sort of work looming in my immediate future.