It's hard to see this gaining traction in a world with the likes of iPython, Octave, R, etc.
Wolfram Programming Cloud
31–40 of 70 posts
Re: Wolfram Programming Cloud
#32There'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--a feat that Lisp and Smalltalk and a horde of gimmicky visual languages* couldn't do.
I'm sure they are referring to how the code is evaluated [1] vs. how it is stored and manipulated by the programmer. Lisp and Prolog are the canonical examples of symbolic languages, and they are both based on plain text.
Re: Wolfram Programming Cloud
#33Earlier 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.
I think the great thing here is the output; better than anything we have in open source so far. I takes a very large amount of effort to make something like that for your language of choice. For the input I agree; it's text and not very nice.
Re: Wolfram Programming Cloud
#34I 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…
> "...this page seemed to be mostly marketing bullshit. For some reason that made them really defensive"
I do hope you were making a joke.
Re: Wolfram Programming Cloud
#35I 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…
> "...this page seemed to be mostly marketing bullshit. For some reason that made them really defensive" I do hope you were making a joke.
For what it's worth, I've also had a hard time recently understanding what the Wolfram Language and associated products are outside of the marketing bullshit.
Re: Wolfram Programming Cloud
#36Here's a writeup by David Auerbach on the Wolfram Programming Language:
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/03/ste...
Re: Wolfram Programming Cloud
#37Is this another one of those Wolfram projects where the results are returned as images?
No. Results can be returned as plain text, images, Instant-APIs[1], WL-code and other.
[1] http://reference.wolfram.com/language/guide/CreatingAnInstan...
(Disclaimer: I work for Wolfram Research)
Re: Wolfram Programming Cloud
#38I 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…
Mathematica is a product that uses the Wolfram Language. As will be the Programming Cloud.
"Mathematica in the cloud" would be Mathematica Online, a separate product from the Programming Cloud: http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/online/
See http://www.wolframcloud.com/ for a wider overview.
The Programming Cloud is specifically focused around workflows and features that programmers are likely to want and need.
So I doubt any of us would have told you that the Programming Cloud is "Mathematica running on our servers with better data store and NLP integration." That's not the way we think or talk internally about our technology stack, and its certainly not the way we talk to customers.
Re: Wolfram Programming Cloud
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "...this page seemed to be mostly marketing bullshit. For some reason that made them really defensive" I do hope you were making a joke.
For what it's worth, I've also had a hard time recently understanding what the Wolfram Language and associated products are outside of the marketing bullshit.
There's only so much we can do before those products are released. The Programming Cloud will go live in the next few weeks, along with executable examples on various language and marketing pages.
For more information about the language, check out http://reference.wolfram.com/language/, as well as http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_P9HqHVPeik
Re: Wolfram Programming Cloud
#40"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.
"It is compared to Fortran and floats somewhere between R and Octave."
I haven't heard a more amusingly wrong characterization of our language in a long, long time.