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Wolfram Programming Cloud

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Re: Wolfram Programming Cloud

#21

Post by pshc »

solipsism wrote: post #18
pshc wrote: post #13

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…

The way I interpret it, they're aiming (rightly) to dismount programming from its local maxima in expressivity that is plaintext 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?

When I say plaintext, I mean like a .c file--a bag of bytes that may or may not parse into the AST you intend. Modern editors dress plaintext up with syntax highlighting, auto-complete, folding, and such--the code has a veneer of structure--but the basic representation remains plaintext. (And for good reason... plaintext is easy to edit with existing editors, tractable, easy to parse, somewhat easy to tool, moderately easy to version control, and hard but possible to transform automatically. But I believe plaintext is only a local maxima in code representation. We just don't have a good enough editor for code ASTs (yet)).

Now in the Wolfram Language REPL they have some rich input capabilities like http://reference.wolfram.com/language/example/BooleanOperati... . I suspect these are still underpinned by plaintext dumps internally, though, judging by http://reference.wolfram.com/language/tutorial/VariablesInPu... .

I should have said that they've gotten farther than anyone else so far, perhaps, but I haven't tried WL yet, so who knows?

Re: Wolfram Programming Cloud

#23

Post by mgraczyk »

I just asked a few Wolfram employees at SXSW what this is. They said, "It's Mathematica running on our servers with better data store and NLP integration."

I also told them that the community seems confused about the product and that this page seemed to be mostly marketing bullshit. For some reason that made them really defensive, and they explained "It's pretty clear from the page what we're offering and the people we're trying to reach will see the value."

FYI to those wondering.

Re: Wolfram Programming Cloud

#24

Post by bananas »

gwolfe3 wrote: post #19
bananas wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

IMO, the only reason you would say that is that you either know nothing about Mathematica, or that your knowledge of it is very superficial (speaking as someone who uses it daily).

I actually used it for about 3 years (2009-2012) for stochastic modelling (insurance). We moved off the platform because to be honest we rewrote most of the functionality we used in C# over a couple of weekends.

When I make those comments, they are about the language, not the ecosystem or the product as a whole.

The language is merely ok.

The ecosystem, particularly with the amount of data feeds you can plug into it is pretty good as is the sheer enormity of the library of off-the-shelf functions it gives you.

Re: Wolfram Programming Cloud

#25

Post by solipsism »

pshc wrote: post #21
solipsism wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I interpret it, they're aiming (rightly) to dismount programming from its local maxima in expressivity that is plaintext 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?

When I say plaintext, I mean like a .c file--a bag of bytes that may or may not parse into the AST you intend. Modern editors dress plaintext up with syntax highlighting, auto-complete, folding, and such--the code has a veneer of structure--but the basic representation remains plaintext. (And for good reason... plaintext is easy to edit with existing editors, tractable, easy to parse, somewhat easy to tool, moderatel…

Yeah, with respect, I think you're being duped. What you're seeing is plain text being drawn as images, making you think the images are input. You only have to click the code to see the plain text (and its not pretty).

Not only have they not gone farther than others, I cant find a single instance of anything in WL that's not plainly plain text. They have interesting output, not particularly interesting input.

Re: Wolfram Programming Cloud

#26

Post by pshc »

solipsism wrote: post #25
pshc wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I say plaintext, I mean like a .c file--a bag of bytes that may or may not parse into the AST you intend. Modern editors dress plaintext up with syntax highlighting, auto-complete, folding, and such--the code has a veneer of structure--but the basic representation remains plaintext. (And for good reason... plaintext is easy to edit with existing editors, tractable, easy to parse, somewhat easy to tool, moderatel…

Yeah, with respect, I think you're being duped. What you're seeing is plain text being drawn as images, making you think the images are input. You only have to click the code to see the plain text (and its not pretty). Not only have they not gone farther than others, I cant find a single instance of anything in WL that's not plainly plain text. They have interesting output, not particularly interesting input.

Damn, that's too bad. Oh well. It's a closed source dead end anyway.

Time to dust off the old side project.

Re: Wolfram Programming Cloud

#27

Post by vincetogo »

solipsism wrote: post #20

For me the real achievement of Wolfram is the visualization capabilities. The knowledge bases are nice if you happen to be interested in a domain that is represented, and they make for great (controlled) demonstrations, but Wolfram Alpha (which taps these same knowledge bases) really fails often when making arbitrary but reasonable queries. I think Wolframs visualization libs set a high bar, though, and I hope non-cl…

My favourite Alpha goof is it interpreting the Planck mass as Max Planck's weight.

Re: Wolfram Programming Cloud

#28

Post by primitivesuave »

For API building this is a much needed paradigm shift to functional programming. I met some backend engineers who built the backend of an very large and complex system with OCaml, and they never wrote a single unit test because they didn't really have to. Although humans are wired to think procedurally, a pure functional style can eliminate many of the holes that are easy to miss in a procedural program.

The only problem I see is that Mathemati... I mean, the Wolfram Language, is not open source. This means that there could be some application-level bug in the service running your API, and no community to quickly identify and patch those bugs. Until things become more transparent, the handful of backend engineers willing to write in a functional style will keep using OCaml or Erlang.

Re: Wolfram Programming Cloud

#29

Post by gwolfe3 »

bananas wrote: post #24
gwolfe3 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO, the only reason you would say that is that you either know nothing about Mathematica, or that your knowledge of it is very superficial (speaking as someone who uses it daily).

I actually used it for about 3 years (2009-2012) for stochastic modelling (insurance). We moved off the platform because to be honest we rewrote most of the functionality we used in C# over a couple of weekends. When I make those comments, they are about the language, not the ecosystem or the product as a whole. The language is merely ok . The ecosystem, particularly with the amount of data feeds you can plug into it…

Ok, your comment was not about what I thought it was (if I understand your response). It was really about how fast Mathematica is and not about the symbolic functional / lisp like / whatever of the language?

Re: Wolfram Programming Cloud

#30

Post by gwolfe3 »

noname123 wrote: post #22

Cool, is Wolfram programming language basically Mathematica + some special domain-area libraries?

Here is my take about the difference between Mathematica and the Wolfram Language: Mathematica is the combination of an interactive front end for writing code/functions etc., sending them to the Mathematica Kernel, and the displaying the results in the form specified by a functional wrapper you specified. The Wolfram Language is what you use to talk to the Mathematica kernel.

But you can also write and save WL code and submit it to the kernel directly. It will do whatever it's supposed to do: acquire and process data, save the results, and it includes all of the familiar Mathematica capabilities: image processing, integrating functions, finding the solution for an equation. You can do this in the kernel now.

The current development seems to be an extension of the range of the current WL as used in Mathematica (the front end/kernel package) into a general purpose language that includes all of the WL's current capabilities plus various new ones that were missing. The WL preliminary documentation site talks about the new stuff, but it's hard to know what's new if you aren't familiar with the current version.

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