It will be interesting to see if this language takes off. I see its use limited to academics mostly. Long-term, I don't expect too much growth since most non-academics would rather use more general-purpose langs.
Wolfram Language
31–40 of 132 posts
Re: Wolfram Language
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks, good to know. I'm most interested though in the parts between the canned procedures (which I assume are written in C or similar), for custom algorithms. For example loops which manipulate arrays and pattern matching (probably not the right term, maybe "rule selection")? I seem to remember the pattern matching was especially slow, though very powerful. Had the latter been fast enough to use, it would have been…
Did you use Compile[] in your functions?
I was able to compile some small expressions, but I couldn't compile some larger functions which had parts that were not compilable (I don't remember why).
However, looking at the compile support now, it looks like it's more fully featured. For example, I see type hinting is supported now (maybe it was before and I didn't know it).
It looks like it's worth trying again.
Re: Wolfram Language
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well this is how it is now I'm afraid. There are "data scientists" using IPython convinced that they themselves and the tools they use are on the cutting edge. Like there are database people who think MongoDB is advanced. Or web guys using their favourite "framework" kidding themselves they're doing anything more complicated than Perl CGIs did in 1994. It's like an Amiga owner being shown a "multimedia" PC in 1995 an…
Amiga example works; took me definitely over 10 years to stop saying that after I was forced to move to PCs. And then I had it with Unix (SparcStation 5s which never crashed and never had to be rebooted against our uni's 100s of PCs which were mandatory rebooted during the night otherwise they were unusable during the day, and still were actually), luckily everyone listened and we're all using that now. Well no, but…
How much do the people working on them get paid to work on them?
What many users of open source don't seem to understand is that actually, honest-to-goodness open source development is a major undertaking and imposition on a person's time. And quality software takes actual teams of actual people with experience and commitment and a basic peace-of-mind about paying their mortgage and putting food on the table.
Re: Wolfram Language
#34Any open source version? Also, to people who have implemented their own language interpreters before, is the description enough to attempt an open source version of it? Might be a fun exercise to try to implement it in jison.
There's a start of an open source implementation of Mathematica called Mathics, which is written in Python.
Javascript would be an interesting choice for a toy implementation, especially because there are orders of magnitude more javascript installations than python, and much more effort put towards making javascript fast. And who knows, maybe the toy would turn into something more serious.
Re: Wolfram Language
#35Serious question: How will memory management work for this? Not-so-serious corollary: How much RAM would a Wolfram wolf if a Wolfram would wolf RAM?
All of it.
Re: Wolfram Language
#36It will be interesting to see if this language takes off. I see its use limited to academics mostly. Long-term, I don't expect too much growth since most non-academics would rather use more general-purpose langs.
[deleted]
Re: Wolfram Language
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
SQL, Prolog, Scheme, and VHDL seem to be doing just fine.
And if you leave off the "interpreted" qualifier, which is (a) a property of an implementation, not a language, and (b) is rather meaningless anyway (can you actually define "interpreted"?), well, then C ought to count too.
Re: Wolfram Language
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is. This is just a description of the language used in Mathematica. Since they are also releasing other products that use the same core language, it looks like they are presenting it in a product-neutral form, but it is just the language of Mathematica.
I'm going to continue programming "in Mathematica" then. Definitely not going to rub his ego by programming "in Wolfram"! His company offers great products... but his personality irritates me.
I am developing a programming language called Egont. It means "the negation of ego".
Re: Wolfram Language
#39This is not intended as a stand-alone language like Python but rather it's DSL dialect for integrating with Wolfram Alpha. You're basically using this dialect to get very specific results from the Wolfram Alpha service.
Re: Wolfram Language
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amiga example works; took me definitely over 10 years to stop saying that after I was forced to move to PCs. And then I had it with Unix (SparcStation 5s which never crashed and never had to be rebooted against our uni's 100s of PCs which were mandatory rebooted during the night otherwise they were unusable during the day, and still were actually), luckily everyone listened and we're all using that now. Well no, but…
How much do the people working on them get paid to work on them? What many users of open source don't seem to understand is that actually, honest-to-goodness open source development is a major undertaking and imposition on a person's time. And quality software takes actual teams of actual people with experience and commitment and a basic peace-of-mind about paying their mortgage and putting food on the table.
You are right and I do understand that actually. So instead of whining I'll go help improve it. Not the web version for now though; the everything web thing is not working for me as at least my i7/16gb/ssd system is far too slow for productive work in that kind of context.