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Wolfram Language

reference.wolfram.com

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Re: Wolfram Language

#81

Post by nswanberg »

GregBuchholz wrote: post #80
nswanberg wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wolfram's The Mathematica Book is a great reference and has some good examples for learning Mathematica (plus, used editions are really cheap: http://www.amazon.com/s/?field-keywords=mathematica+book ) You can look at the contents online to see if it clicks with you: http://reference.wolfram.com/legacy/v5/ Mathematica Cookbook is also a nice reference. The book is much less systematic, but provides code that solves m…

Thanks. Is the language pretty stable, but the libraries are what mostly changes between Mathematica releases? Or is there much obsolete stuff in version 5 that's not present in version 9 or 10?

There's very little that's obsolete. The newer versions almost exclusively bring additions.

Re: Wolfram Language

#82

Post by tremols »

rlx0x wrote: post #52

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_P9HqHVPeik "Stephen™ Wolfram™'s Introduction to the Wolfram™ Language" That Wolfram™ Language and the Wolfram™ Cloud is going to change the world forever, the language is so great because its Wolfram™ Symbolic and since it all just runs in the Wolfram™ Cloud its really fast. You can put all your financial data in the Wolfram™ and do things. You know they worked 30 years on this, and it…

I had the same impression.. and whats with the body language of the guy? waving his hands like a populist dictator... signs of "oh no we really need marketing because the product sucks".

The product can be good actually... but this kind of narcisistic marketing is better suited for weight loss products, self help, pick-up techniques e-book, etc (anything that gets money on your insecurity).

Re: Wolfram Language

#83

Post by brudgers »

jakobe wrote: post #78
brudgers wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That this is a top rated comment is fucking pathetic. His name is on the door. Unlike the late beloved Steve Jobs, he does not afford himself the opportunity to blame others for product problems. It's a higher standard - one without "Hold it another way" copouts and buy our products to show your good taste values. He built his startip into a company that makes amazing products that can be used to really change the wo…

No need to shit on Steve Jobs in order to praise Steven Wolfram. Both are good businessmen that built great products and successful companies. And they had great respect for one another. And it's not like Wolfram is giving stuff away for free. Have you seen how much a Mathematica license costs? I loved using Mathematica at my university, but now I just can't afford a license anymore.

Steve Jobs built a business around charging students full retail and encouraging educational institutions to promote Apple computers to them. Freshman are encourage to take out loans to buy Apple products with a support life cycle that ends before they graduate. Any admiration for Mr. Jobs is based on something other than human community.

Re: Wolfram Language

#84

Post by colanderman »

muyuu wrote: post #67
abjorn wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not as if they started as a "family" of languages, each one of those was just one discrete language at one point.

I'm a big fan of Prolog and Scheme, but seriously the lack of an established solid spec has seriously hurted them. There's no way Wolfram can succeed with its much more complex feature set without a spec and a reference implementation that's not closed source. Flash pulled that because they caught that opportunity window in the browsed, but neither CDF as a format nor Wolfram (Mathematica language) stand a chance as…

You think ISO Prolog and R6RS aren't "established" and "solid"?

Re: Wolfram Language

#85

Post by colanderman »

khyryk wrote: post #70
colanderman wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm trying to figure out how VHDL fits in that list. It's essentially a spec in itself, only for hardware rather than software, is it not?

It's a language, it's formally specified (by the IEEE), and it has no preeminent reference implementation. Its domain is irrelevant to the assertion I countered.

Re: Wolfram Language

#86

Post by colanderman »

muyuu wrote: post #41
colanderman wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Uh, all ISO Prolog programs run on all ISO Prolog implementations, regardless of what extensions a particular implementation has. Same for RxRS Scheme.

And VHDL and C99 definitely aren't "families" of languages. GCC, Clang, ICC, and maybe even MSVC all interpret the same code semantically equivalently. Unless you can either show C99 to be unsuccessful, find a reference implementation of C99, or define "interpreted" in a meaningful way, I think your assertion doesn't hold.

Re: Wolfram Language

#87

Post by GregBuchholz »

nswanberg wrote: post #81
GregBuchholz wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. Is the language pretty stable, but the libraries are what mostly changes between Mathematica releases? Or is there much obsolete stuff in version 5 that's not present in version 9 or 10?

There's very little that's obsolete. The newer versions almost exclusively bring additions.

Good to know. It makes sense that for a proprietary language implementation you need to bump major versions on a more regular basis. Perl 1.0 has some significant differences from perl 5.18.0.

Re: Wolfram Language

#88

Post by GregBuchholz »

jakobe wrote: post #78
brudgers wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That this is a top rated comment is fucking pathetic. His name is on the door. Unlike the late beloved Steve Jobs, he does not afford himself the opportunity to blame others for product problems. It's a higher standard - one without "Hold it another way" copouts and buy our products to show your good taste values. He built his startip into a company that makes amazing products that can be used to really change the wo…

No need to shit on Steve Jobs in order to praise Steven Wolfram. Both are good businessmen that built great products and successful companies. And they had great respect for one another. And it's not like Wolfram is giving stuff away for free. Have you seen how much a Mathematica license costs? I loved using Mathematica at my university, but now I just can't afford a license anymore.

>And it's not like Wolfram is giving stuff away for free.

I think he is...

http://www.wolfram.com/raspberry-pi/

Re: Wolfram Language

#89

Post by muyuu »

colanderman wrote: post #84
muyuu wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a big fan of Prolog and Scheme, but seriously the lack of an established solid spec has seriously hurted them. There's no way Wolfram can succeed with its much more complex feature set without a spec and a reference implementation that's not closed source. Flash pulled that because they caught that opportunity window in the browsed, but neither CDF as a format nor Wolfram (Mathematica language) stand a chance as…

You think ISO Prolog and R6RS aren't "established" and "solid"?

Definitely. I use both and nobody uses ISO Prolog and much less pure R6RS scheme. Here's hoping R7RS will be better although for starters it will be divided in two (small and big). I've been following the process quite closely.

R6RS completely failed to establish itself, to this day R5RS is more popular.

You'd be hard pressed to find a more divided language than Scheme. As for ISO Prolog, it's not even the most popular standard. It might be in America, in Europe it's definitely Edinburgh Prolog and there's where it's used the most.

You guys are giving me great examples of how interpreted languages without a clear spec + reference implementation completely fail to establish a single standard. It can be argued that in the case of Scheme this is a feature, but for something like Wolfram with an existing closed runtime you definitely don't want this.

Re: Wolfram Language

#90

Post by staunch »

brudgers wrote: post #83
jakobe wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No need to shit on Steve Jobs in order to praise Steven Wolfram. Both are good businessmen that built great products and successful companies. And they had great respect for one another. And it's not like Wolfram is giving stuff away for free. Have you seen how much a Mathematica license costs? I loved using Mathematica at my university, but now I just can't afford a license anymore.

Steve Jobs built a business around charging students full retail and encouraging educational institutions to promote Apple computers to them. Freshman are encourage to take out loans to buy Apple products with a support life cycle that ends before they graduate. Any admiration for Mr. Jobs is based on something other than human community.

If you can't acknowledge Steve Jobs massive contributions to technological progress you're extremely confused about the history.
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