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Launching Today: Mathematica Online

blog.wolfram.com

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Re: Launching Today: Mathematica Online

#3

Post by williamstein »

I have been waiting for "Mathematica Online" to be released since they've been giving hints about it "coming soon" since about 2008. So this is a big announcement. Us Sage developers have also been building something similar to this, but around IPython/Sage https://cloud.sagemath.com, and we've also built something similar for embedding in web pages https://sagecell.sagemath.org/.

Re: Launching Today: Mathematica Online

#4

Post by tunesmith »

I'm curious about other people's experiences learning the Wolfram language if they're not already a mathematician. I've been tempted a few times, but the language (and Mathematica itself) has so far struck me as one of those "Sure, seems like it can do amazing things after you already know how to do it" types of technologies. As opposed to languages where you can reason yourself towards the correct approach. It seems sort of similar to Applescript that way. What was it it like for you to learn it, and how did you go about it?

Re: Launching Today: Mathematica Online

#5

Post by spitfire »

tunesmith wrote: post #4

I'm curious about other people's experiences learning the Wolfram language if they're not already a mathematician. I've been tempted a few times, but the language (and Mathematica itself) has so far struck me as one of those "Sure, seems like it can do amazing things after you already know how to do it" types of technologies. As opposed to languages where you can reason yourself towards the correct approach. It seems…

If you come from a programming background, just treat it as a Lisp with M-expressions rather than S-expressions. It all comes together quite quickly then.

At it's core Mathematica is actually a rule rewriting engine. but except for more heavyweight uses you can view it as simply a Lisp with the worlds best standard library.

Re: Launching Today: Mathematica Online

#6

Post by jonknee »

tunesmith wrote: post #4

I'm curious about other people's experiences learning the Wolfram language if they're not already a mathematician. I've been tempted a few times, but the language (and Mathematica itself) has so far struck me as one of those "Sure, seems like it can do amazing things after you already know how to do it" types of technologies. As opposed to languages where you can reason yourself towards the correct approach. It seems…

Similar to Applescript it seems like a good way to scratch your own itches, but not to build a product with. That's perfect for academia, but not for your average programmer. It does look fascinating though and has been on my rainy day list for a while.

Re: Launching Today: Mathematica Online

#8

Post by larve »

spitfire wrote: post #5
tunesmith wrote: post #4

I'm curious about other people's experiences learning the Wolfram language if they're not already a mathematician. I've been tempted a few times, but the language (and Mathematica itself) has so far struck me as one of those "Sure, seems like it can do amazing things after you already know how to do it" types of technologies. As opposed to languages where you can reason yourself towards the correct approach. It seems…

If you come from a programming background, just treat it as a Lisp with M-expressions rather than S-expressions. It all comes together quite quickly then. At it's core Mathematica is actually a rule rewriting engine. but except for more heavyweight uses you can view it as simply a Lisp with the worlds best standard library.

it's a great language, once you get past the fact that writing code in the notebook is a horrible experience. You get a great lisp, along with pattern matching and rule replacement.

I can recommend the book by Paul Welling, as well as the books by Michael Trott (very meandering).

Just funking things up in the notebook is the most fun I've been having in a long time. You just get sucked into trying more and more things, adding manipulates around it, playing some more, taking the output image and running image processing on it then converting it to a mesh on which you solve differential equations.

Re: Launching Today: Mathematica Online

#9

Post by ssivark »

tunesmith wrote: post #4

I'm curious about other people's experiences learning the Wolfram language if they're not already a mathematician. I've been tempted a few times, but the language (and Mathematica itself) has so far struck me as one of those "Sure, seems like it can do amazing things after you already know how to do it" types of technologies. As opposed to languages where you can reason yourself towards the correct approach. It seems…

Since my first exposure was to Matlab/Scilab, I felt like my initial interactions with Mathematica were like trying to bang my head against a wall.

Over the last year, as I incidentally got interested in Haskell and Lambda calculus, it dawned on my that Mathematica's language is built for functional programming. It felt like I'd just managed to find the light-switch. Now that I understand, it all makes sense when somebody says that all Mathematica essentially does is search and replace. I think this is in the spirit of a model of computation called [Markov algorithms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_algorithm).

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