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Wolfram Language

reference.wolfram.com

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Re: Wolfram Language

#41

Post by muyuu »

colanderman wrote: post #37
muyuu wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

None of these are established as a single compatible language but rather as a family of languages.

Wolfram obviously isn't aiming for that.

Go to Wolfram's page. That is no spec, it's a rough description of a particular implementation of a (closed source) system.

Re: Wolfram Language

#42

Post by sbrother »

It's an amazing language - basically lisp with the biggest standard library you've ever imagined, and nice (but slow) pattern matching. I used to use it all the time when I was doing one-off projects at school and for clients. But I don't see it taking off unless it goes FOSS - while I have a license and I'd love to keep using it I can't justify it to employers or clients who want to actually be able to run my code after I leave. The alternatives (Python, R, maybe Julia) are good enough now to do most things you'd want to use Mathematica for, and they don't come with per core usage restrictions. To me Mathematica is well worth its price tag, but I only came to that conclusion because I was able to experiment with it for free during college.

Re: Wolfram Language

#43

Post by carlob »

snorkel wrote: post #39

This 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.

Not quite. That's only one facet of it, you can still do whatever you were doing with Mathematica without alpha.

Re: Wolfram Language

#44

Post by carlob »

praseodym wrote: post #28
oleganza wrote: post #14

When 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…

Except that the Mathematica editor still lacks a decent undo function: http://undo-for-mathematica.alaifari.com/undo-how-useless/

The v10 beta I have has it. So you won't have to wait much longer.

Re: Wolfram Language

#46

Post by gaius »

pwang wrote: post #33
tluyben2 wrote: post #26

Earlier 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.

No, it's more subtle than that. If you have paying customers and hence money, you can pay for experts in domain X to sit down with your programmers and finesse the product. If you don't, then what you have is a wishlist of features but no real, deep understanding of what users use them for. That's why the GIMP is the GIMP, every feature under the sun, in a horrible mishmash interface and for more of its life unusable for professional work because the one feature it really needed, 16-bit colour, wasn't prioritized because none of the devs realized they needed to.

Re: Wolfram Language

#47

Post by bunderbunder »

muyuu wrote: post #17
colanderman wrote: post #15

Earlier 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.

VBScript and AppleScript come to mind.

Oh, how I wish they had, some days. But they didn't.

Re: Wolfram Language

#48

Post by PieSquared »

tluyben2 wrote: post #16
oleganza wrote: post #14

When 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 mak…

As the author of IHaskell, I'd love to know what you find lacking! (I agree that there's still a lot of room for improvement) The front-end is entirely IPython, so there's probably not much I can do other than contribute to ipython, but would love to hear concrete suggestions (feel free to use github issues).

Re: Wolfram Language

#49

Post by muyuu »

bunderbunder wrote: post #47
muyuu wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

VBScript and AppleScript come to mind. Oh, how I wish they had, some days. But they didn't.

Both qualify as failures to me, but they did have at least a spec.

Re: Wolfram Language

#50

Post by sbrother »

snorkel wrote: post #39

This 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.

Not really. Wolfram Alpha is a pretty recent addition to the Wolfram product lineup, and Mathematica/"Wolfram Language" was very popular in academia before that. There wasn't even a direct way to access Alpha from Mathematica until Mathematica 9 (or maybe 8, I forget) and even now it's not a very commonly used feature. The Alpha API call limits (1000 per day for a professional license) pretty much prevent you from doing any serious work with Alpha.
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