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I know those guys are super smart and all, but I can't read any of their marketing materials without my bullshit detector going haywire.
Wolfram stuff is like a completely different world that doesn't acknowledge anyone else. In context to them it makes sense, but to everyone else it's WTF and meh and not much in between. I remember the pre-Wolfram Alpha marketing. It wasn't nearly as impressive as they made it out to be. The product was cool but to hype it up like that only did damage. To be honest it always reminds me of Futurama: "welcome to the wo…
The problem for everybody else is that there's just enough interesting in Wolfram's output to make it hard to dismiss outright.
Ctrl-F for "symbolic" in that page returns 14 results. The way I interpret it, they're aiming (rightly) to dismount programming from its local maxima in expressivity that is plaintext--a feat that Lisp and Smalltalk and a horde of gimmicky visual languages* couldn't do. Wolfram Language won't succeed here, but they'll get closer than anyone else has.
* Not saying that visual languages are inherently gimmicky; just that when you do write one, it's extremely tempting to fall into toyland.
Is this another one of those Wolfram projects where the results are returned as images?
needs a tl;dr.
"THE WORLD'S HIGHEST LEVEL LANGUAGE" <-- based on what?
So it's not all that high level. It is compared to Fortran and floats somewhere between R and Octave.
"THE WORLD'S HIGHEST LEVEL LANGUAGE" <-- based on what?
Seriously though, it doesn't seem too far-fetched a claim after seeing all the stuff demoed in the screencast they put out:
Getting pedantic, I suppose there's a distinction between the language in isolation and with its stdlib/environment.
There's no way a proprietary environment can be the future of programming, but Wolfram does have the right ideas. Ctrl-F for "symbolic" in that page returns 14 results. The way I interpret it, they're aiming (rightly) to dismount programming from its local maxima in expressivity that is plaintext--a feat that Lisp and Smalltalk and a horde of gimmicky visual languages* couldn't do. Wolfram Language won't succeed here…
Where do you get this idea, out of curiosity? Every demonstration of Wolfram Language I've seen has been plain text. And what makes you think they'll get farther than everyone else?
"THE WORLD'S HIGHEST LEVEL LANGUAGE" <-- based on what?
Looks like mathematica in a web browser to me. Probably cheaper as well. So it's not all that high level. It is compared to Fortran and floats somewhere between R and Octave.
I think Wolframs visualization libs set a high bar, though, and I hope non-closed communities (like the python scientific/mathematic programming community, the R community, etc) will rally to meet the challenge.