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Wolfram Programming Cloud

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Re: Wolfram Programming Cloud

#51

Post by bananas »

gwolfe3 wrote: post #29
bananas wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's more about what people use it for and how they use it rather than capabilities. I was a little cranky and sarcastic initially and I don't think that came across clearly!

Re: Wolfram Programming Cloud

#52

Post by bananas »

taliesinb wrote: post #41
bane wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem for them of course is that they exist in context to everything else in the world. So a "huge" innovation to their local context, because they just realized something everybody else knows, is just "meh" or "already tried" and determined to be uninteresting or useless. The problem for everybody else is that there's just enough interesting in Wolfram's output to make it hard to dismiss outright.

> determined to be uninteresting or useless. Your thesis seems to be that we're so naive that we re-invent discarded or failed ideas and call them innovations. Can you give an example? I'll give you just a two counter-examples off the top of my head. 1. Our frontend uses what turned out to be functional reactive programming to accomplish seamlessly interactive UI. And FRP is widely considered to be a Good Idea. 2. We…

The notebook REPL has actually been around way before Mathematica. Probably 1972. Perhaps it wasn't semantically complete but it was essentially there. I would suggest the concept is obvious.

Re: Wolfram Programming Cloud

#53

Post by taliesinb »

anaphor wrote: post #48
taliesinb wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> determined to be uninteresting or useless. Your thesis seems to be that we're so naive that we re-invent discarded or failed ideas and call them innovations. Can you give an example? I'll give you just a two counter-examples off the top of my head. 1. Our frontend uses what turned out to be functional reactive programming to accomplish seamlessly interactive UI. And FRP is widely considered to be a Good Idea. 2. We…

Well the idea of building as much as possible into the language is old and has repeatedly failed. Languages like PL/1, APL, and to a lesser extent PHP have all tried and failed at this. People do not need huge languages with as much stuff as possible crammed into them. What they need are languages where you can be reasonably certain, and maybe even formally prove things about the execution of your code (putting every…

> People do not need huge languages with as much stuff as possible crammed into them.

I think you should replace "people" with "systems programmers" in order not to express an opinion that will in time (if not already) prove to be anachronistic and narrow-minded.

And the kinds of things we're "cramming in" (in reality, very slowly and methodically adding) have little to do with what you'd find in the languages you mention.

Think of it like this: standard libraries are great, but give you access to functionality that is effectively linear in the amount of stuff you learn, because they cannot be too tightly coupled in order to remain modular in the usual way.

With the Wolfram Language, you have more of a network effect: the more you learn, the more useful what you already know becomes, because the topic modelling you did over there can produce a network you can cluster over here and that you can then decorate with the graphics primitives you just learned about.

> The whole idea of claiming "moar data" solves everything comes across as incredibly naive and ignorant of what people like Tony Hoare, Dijkstra, or Alan Perlis have said about computing.

What is the "everything" that needs to be "solved"? Writing systems software?

I'm sure having graphs and images and timeseries built into your language isn't tremendously useful for writing a server. But people have already written servers. We don't need more languages to write servers (other than Rust or Go, perhaps).

We "need" the next generation of smart apps, things you couldn't even contemplate if you didn't already have access to curated data and algorithms that all work together. Or rather, that's what Wolfram Research is trying to make possible.

Re: Wolfram Programming Cloud

#54

Post by taliesinb »

aufreak3 wrote: post #49
taliesinb wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> determined to be uninteresting or useless. Your thesis seems to be that we're so naive that we re-invent discarded or failed ideas and call them innovations. Can you give an example? I'll give you just a two counter-examples off the top of my head. 1. Our frontend uses what turned out to be functional reactive programming to accomplish seamlessly interactive UI. And FRP is widely considered to be a Good Idea. 2. We…

Great examples and way ahead indeed! On a similar note, it would really help if the website for the Wolfram Programming Cloud had just one bloody-awesome/blow-me-away example or tutorial that would make it accessible to a lot of capable programmers who may not have used a Mathematica Notebook. Folks who haven't used Mathematica ever - I recommend the Home Edition. Yes, it is worth paying for it!

Thanks!

A blow-me-down tutorial (or better yet, video with updating live REPL) is definitely on the cards.

Re: Wolfram Programming Cloud

#55

Post by bananas »

taliesinb wrote: post #53
anaphor wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the idea of building as much as possible into the language is old and has repeatedly failed. Languages like PL/1, APL, and to a lesser extent PHP have all tried and failed at this. People do not need huge languages with as much stuff as possible crammed into them. What they need are languages where you can be reasonably certain, and maybe even formally prove things about the execution of your code (putting every…

> People do not need huge languages with as much stuff as possible crammed into them. I think you should replace "people" with "systems programmers" in order not to express an opinion that will in time (if not already) prove to be anachronistic and narrow-minded. And the kinds of things we're "cramming in" (in reality, very slowly and methodically adding) have little to do with what you'd find in the languages you me…

So in conclusion, it's not a systems programming language.

I think we got that.

So to break it down, and this is how I understand it as a user, it's a collection of algorithms, Lego bricks of math and a library of data sources glued together with a functional REPL that is semantically represented as a notebook.

Can you stick that on the web site somewhere without the millions of bullet points, marketoid spew and weaseling.

Re: Wolfram Programming Cloud

#56

Post by fijal »

taliesinb wrote: post #38
mgraczyk wrote: post #23

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…

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 d…

"The Programming Cloud is specifically focused around workflows and features that programmers are likely to want and need." - that sounds like an awful marketing speak to me. What do you actually MEAN?

Re: Wolfram Programming Cloud

#57

Post by ethomson »

natch wrote: post #7

Is this another one of those Wolfram projects where the results are returned as images?

I worked at Wolfram about twenty years ago, where I met a guy named Dan who was (at the time) quietly hacking on a side project to put Mathematica on the web. Eventually this project became "The Integrator" (and surprisingly, seems to live on as integrals.com).

At first, The Integrator only returned results in mma syntax. If you entered the expression `Cos[x]`, it would return - literally - `Sin[x]`. This was neat and all, but once you had a result with exponentiation or division or what not, you'd want a prettier result. For example, if you asked for the integral of `Sin[x^2]`, it would spit out `Sqrt[Pi/2]FresnelS[Sqrt[2/Pi]x]`, which, you know, ew.

Twenty years ago, of course, there was no MathML - there wasn't even a working group. So in order to provide a prettier result, he returned a GIF with the Math-rendered output. Because this was back when we were still using client-side imagemaps and some browsers still didn't support inline jpegs. So this quick hack was totally reasonable.

Since The Integrator's compute backend was actually on his desk, he put a caching layer in front of the Mathematica instance. It was a trivial one, so if you asked for the integral of Sin[x], it would just look for Sin[x].gif in the cache directory and if that existed, it wouldn't send the query of to the Mathematica backend.

Unsurprisingly, this led to us kids just stuffing a bunch of crazy GIFs into the cache directory. Dan started it - if you tried to integrate his initials, it would return a picture of him. After that, though, we piled on and eventually you could integrate all our names, as well as a bunch of internal jokes.

I worked on The Integrator after Dan left, and of course I kept the easter eggs, but at some point it was handed off to another team who tried to create some more general web front-end to Mathematica. This team sadly lacked both Dan's cleverness and his sense of humor, so not only was the software slow and clunky, but it also lacked the easter eggs.

I'm always surprised that Wolfram Alpha - twenty years later - still renders its results and returns a GIF. You'd think that we could do a little bit better by now. I just hope that somewhere, one of the people working way too many hours to keep that site online has slid some easter eggs in.

Re: Wolfram Programming Cloud

#58

Post by jessedhillon »

bananas wrote: post #55
taliesinb wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People do not need huge languages with as much stuff as possible crammed into them. I think you should replace "people" with "systems programmers" in order not to express an opinion that will in time (if not already) prove to be anachronistic and narrow-minded. And the kinds of things we're "cramming in" (in reality, very slowly and methodically adding) have little to do with what you'd find in the languages you me…

So in conclusion, it's not a systems programming language. I think we got that. So to break it down, and this is how I understand it as a user, it's a collection of algorithms, Lego bricks of math and a library of data sources glued together with a functional REPL that is semantically represented as a notebook. Can you stick that on the web site somewhere without the millions of bullet points, marketoid spew and weas…

My God, the keyboard courage runs thick on this thread.

Re: Wolfram Programming Cloud

#59

Post by bananas »

jessedhillon wrote: post #58
bananas wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So in conclusion, it's not a systems programming language. I think we got that. So to break it down, and this is how I understand it as a user, it's a collection of algorithms, Lego bricks of math and a library of data sources glued together with a functional REPL that is semantically represented as a notebook. Can you stick that on the web site somewhere without the millions of bullet points, marketoid spew and weas…

My God, the keyboard courage runs thick on this thread.

Yeah it does. We've experienced the emperor's new clothes before so scepticism and rational analysis is important.

Re: Wolfram Programming Cloud

#60

Post by cormullion »

taliesinb wrote: post #38
mgraczyk wrote: post #23

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…

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 d…

Judging from the reactions in the press, and even in Mathematica user communities, there's a lot of confusion about what's coming. For some people, a bit of plain speaking, rather than marketing hyperbole and premature teasing, would be welcome. However, I'll admit that the WolframBuzzWord tactics are generating a lot of attention, which is probably the point.
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