Who is this product aimed at? If it's academics, students, etc, then it's doomed, the wave today is free open source software.
Wolfram has gobs of money, at this point. He probably just works on whatever he thinks is cool.
Wolfram Language
11–20 of 132 posts
Re: Wolfram Language
#12Where's the source code? Is this something like CDF that can be only used from Wolfram's binary blob plugin/exes? If they don't release the sources for the compiler/interpreter it will be as popular as their Computable Document Format.
Good question. If they don't release the source, then this, as awesome as it is, is just a product and not a language.
Re: Wolfram Language
#13I'd be interested to know quite how they're solving the "canonical names for everything" problem [0]. They're presumably making their own ontology, rather than using someone else's.
Also, best attribute name ever [1]: "BoundStateWaveFunctionMomentumRepresentationAbsoluteValueSquared"
[0]: http://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/CanonicalName.html [1]: http://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/PhysicalSystemData...
Re: Wolfram Language
#14When I was a student at university in 2003-2008, I loved, loved, loved Mathematica language, Mathematica uncluttered cell-based editor and rich interactive documentation. You could execute and edit examples right in the doc! I did so many things: nicely formatted pages (much easier to type in complex formulas than in LaTeX), computing simulations, crazy charts etc. I never could understand how people can use Matlab or Maple when there is Mathematica.
Re: Wolfram Language
#15Where's the source code? Is this something like CDF that can be only used from Wolfram's binary blob plugin/exes? If they don't release the sources for the compiler/interpreter it will be as popular as their Computable Document Format.
Good question. If they don't release the source, then this, as awesome as it is, is just a product and not a language.
Languages don't have source code, they have documentation. I haven't looked through it all, but this appears to be documentation specifying (to some degree) the Wolfram Language. Therefore the language exists, regardless of whether any implementations of interpreters or compilers thereof exist and are open-source.
Re: Wolfram Language
#16When I was a student at university in 2003-2008, I loved, loved, loved Mathematica language, Mathematica uncluttered cell-based editor and rich interactive documentation. You could execute and edit examples right in the doc! I did so many things: nicely formatted pages (much easier to type in complex formulas than in LaTeX), computing simulations, crazy charts etc. I never could understand how people can use Matlab o…
Yeah I liked it as well; the notebook execution especially. Makes me sad to see how primitive iPython/iHaskell now are compared to the Mathematica editor almost 20 years ago. I hoped it would be the about same experience or better, but it's far from. Especially the web version for iHaskell (I assume the iPython web version is the same?) is horrible, absolutely horrible. But the idea is great and it is possible to make it work well as Wolfram has shown.
Re: Wolfram Language
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good question. If they don't release the source, then this, as awesome as it is, is just a product and not a language.
Languages don't have source code, they have documentation. I haven't looked through it all, but this appears to be documentation specifying (to some degree) the Wolfram Language. Therefore the language exists, regardless of whether any implementations of interpreters or compilers thereof exist and are open-source.
A formal spec would be good enough too. But since he's specifying concrete output and graphics as part of the language, it's rather hard to specify binary-compatibility without a reference implementation.
This is why there are no interpreted languages without a reference implementation that haven't failed miserably.
Re: Wolfram Language
#18From the demo video, it seems a query language to query a database of knowledge. how's this knowledge database maintained and self updated are more interesting than the query language itself.
Re: Wolfram Language
#19Has the language grown much faster in recent years? I coded some microarray data analysis in Mathematica at one point a few years ago, and was very disappointed in the slow execution, it made it unusable. It may have been a "naive" implementation that could be much improved, but a similarly naive Java implementation was much faster and not significantly more difficult to write.
Depends on what you mean by recent. In the last 10 years: yes, much faster for number crunching (like SVD, Cholesky, determinant computations, etc).
Re: Wolfram Language
#20Previous HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7293741
That was for the Demo video, not for the page to the language documentation itself.