71–75 of 75 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Wow, nice demo. It is interesting to see Wolfram explain his vision for an "ultimate fusion language" -- a powerful multi-paradigm language, a huge standard library, data sources, and deployment all rolled into one. This monolithic approach seems to be the opposite of the Unix philosophy, and I wonder how that will play out. There are clearly benefits to be gained from smooth integration, and the demo is impressive c…
Well, it's not like the Unix philosophy is the only game in town, or has been proven best, or anything.
Emacs, for one, is anything but Unix philosophy, but it's still a very good tool.
And such things are "monolithic" only if you consider an executable as the only possible unit of isolation. You can have other ways to modularize stuff.
E.g a full featured huge program can have modules, plugins, etc that "do a thing and do it well". Just because it can do what 100 unix utilities can do combined, doesn't mean it's monolithic into how it's internally structured.
As 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/5…
I would sure like to see the code for its repl. If it's all he says, that loop should be uniquely tiny.