This seems super exciting. I'm not sure if you could build large-scale applications with it, but I cannot wait to play around with it. Side note: The use of "I" and "My" really irks me. I imagine many, many people made this happen and contributed to these design goals. I guess this shouldn't take away from how cool this technology is, but it definitely leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Wolfram started a startup and put his name on the door and it has been incredibly successful. No story about Wolfram appears on HN without someone complaining about his ego. Perhaps he is the Mohammed Ali of programming.
Starting to Demo the Wolfram Language [video]
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Re: Starting to Demo the Wolfram Language [video]
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
From using both Lisp and Wolfram language (in the good old days when it didn't have a name and was called "the language Mathematica uses"), I have to say I find lowercase and dashes, parenthesis and spaces more readable than CamelCase, square brackets and commas.
Re: Starting to Demo the Wolfram Language [video]
#63This 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.
Ah, so now people will have a database process, an application process, and maybe a wolfram process to handle tough computation...
Re: Starting to Demo the Wolfram Language [video]
#64It was once said that Stephen Wolfram builds such powerful tools that even the great man himself doesn't know how to use or explain what these tools are :P
On a more serious note, think of this language as something highly-sophisticated tech and other-industry companies might use.
You won't be building a farting-noise-type app with this language, unless it is a bowel-detecting-smell-sniffing-doctor-replacing-treatment-providing analysis app that uses sensors to compute the above scenario.
If Wolfram wants the language to be used in knowledge and computation fields, then maybe a couple of demos on how to use it for something like stock-trading, or tweet-timing-reach or weather-analysis might get this into the hands of people that use computation in some form with rather 'primitive' tools when compared to the Wolfram language (which basically is the equivalent of a huge-ass library and works like a huge-ass framework of sorts).
I personally would probably like to try or see the language being used in optimizing an industry like logistics or travel or anything to do with maximizing time-efficiency.
Re: Starting to Demo the Wolfram Language [video]
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wolfram started a startup and put his name on the door and it has been incredibly successful. No story about Wolfram appears on HN without someone complaining about his ego. Perhaps he is the Mohammed Ali of programming.
perhaps : http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfra...
This is the other thing that's almost guaranteed to appear for some reason. I think Taliesin did a good rebuttal to it a while back: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3974503
As for Stephen's ego, I'm surprised it keeps getting mentioned. He seems like a driven person, but then so are many people whose egos aren't discussed. He comes off as quite a decent person in this Reddit thread http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/tmutz/stephen_wolfram_... and in this interview with Scoble: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNf8Se_USlE
All of this has only a tenuous connection to the language itself, which is much more interesting to discuss. Sure, it may be the only self-named language (thought it arguably owes its name as much to the brand Wolfram Research as to Stephen, and I'd hoped they'd come up with a more creative name), but if one manages to shepherd a system like Mathematica through 25 years, one earns the right to self-name a language.
Re: Starting to Demo the Wolfram Language [video]
#66As someone that wasn't a math major, I regularly get excited about Mathematica but then have trouble figuring out why I would actually want to use it. If someone were to give me an assignment that they knew could be accomplished with Mathematica, then that would be easier to start, but I feel like it takes a while to make that translation between having a vague desire to figure something out, and then realize that Ma…
I'm not a Mathematica user, but I've always enjoyed browsing the Mathematica Stack Exchange, which might be what you're looking for. For example, here someone asks how to generate random snowflakes, and many interesting solutions are provided.
http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/39361/how-to-...
Edit: here's a more real-life example, peeling labels from jars http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/5676/how-to-p...
Re: Starting to Demo the Wolfram Language [video]
#67I would sure like to see the code for its repl. If it's all he says, that loop should be uniquely tiny.
Re: Starting to Demo the Wolfram Language [video]
#68I 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…
Wolfram Language has much more functionality than what existed in Mathematica, so it remains to be seen if it will have applicability outside of toy problems. So, it isn't fair to judge it solely on the merits of Mathematica. Also, social conventions are exactly that - conventions implicitly or explicitly chosen by a group of people. That group of people does not encompass the entire population of the planet. Hence,…
You make an excellent point about social convention, and I completely agree. However, one important thing to note is that SW is not involved with core Mathematica development, he does research and remotely manages his company. He suggests high level features that are then implemented by the kernel team (which I was on). One incredibly annoying aspect of this bureaucratic development process is that you never know when your kernel project will get killed by someone higher up the food chain. Obviously, this happens at many companies, but when it happens as often as it did when I was there, you see key employees leaving a lot more often than you do elsewhere.
It's worth pointing out that the architecture of Mathematica was designed by Stephen, and in my experience with other large software projects, it is by far the most elegant and well-designed. Reading the original code base gives every developer a great appreciation for the genius of Stephen Wolfram, who is a completely self-taught computer scientist. So he definitely deserves credit for what the language is today, because if he hadn't planned that far ahead and realized the need for a general purpose computing platform, the pace at which the Mathematica team can add new features would not be nearly as fast.
Re: Starting to Demo the Wolfram Language [video]
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Can it play Flappy Bird? Power the next cool startup? Give me an answer to a question I might have today? Although it is possible to make games in Mathematica, it is a painful process. At the Wolfram Technology Conference two years ago, I met some startup founders who were using Mathematica for some big data projects. It works great for people as a tool to use in the background for visualization and data analysis,…
Yeah I really like where I think it is, but it still has that "mad genius" feel to it, where one guy explains how awesome it is and you're left kind of empty-handed. Want to see a lot more eyeballs on this and people playing with it. Hope Wolfram doesn't let "licensing fever" get in the way of the community understanding it fully.
Here are some cool open source projects that use Mathematica.
HadoopLink: https://github.com/shadanan/HadoopLink
ArduinoLink: https://github.com/keshavsaharia/ArduinoLink
Re: Starting to Demo the Wolfram Language [video]
#70Earlier 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…
Sorry for being inaccurate Tali, you're right about the parsing and the other areas where WL is being used. It's been a while since I poked around WA.