31–40 of 55 posts
I want to get excited about Wolfram and Mathematica again. All of their blog posts are rather informative great reads. But then I head over to the pricing page and am reminded of why I love open source tools.
The Wolfram Programming Cloud even has a free tier. The online IDE does not have quite as smooth an experience as the desktop IDE, however. https://programming.wolframcloud.com/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Wolfram Programming Cloud even has a free tier. The online IDE does not have quite as smooth an experience as the desktop IDE, however. https://programming.wolframcloud.com/
Is your CDF format ever going to be publicly specified?
Whenever I see Wolfram/Mathematica stuff like this, I'm not entirely sure if it's incredibly brilliant and will replace all computing as we know it, or completely batshit insane and impenetrable unless you've spent 20 years learning it. Usually I lean towards the latter though, and this is supported by the fact that I've never seen anybody not employed by Wolfram do this kind of thing. See also: http://blog.wolfram.c…
Partly this is because we're so niche still that there just there just isn't a huge audience of developers to write large programs in WL yet, barring exceptions like [0]. I have no doubt that HN readers could do some amazing things in WL if they invested a modest amount of time in learning it. [0] Emerald Therapeutics: http://emeraldcloudlab.com/
Whenever I see Wolfram/Mathematica stuff like this, I'm not entirely sure if it's incredibly brilliant and will replace all computing as we know it, or completely batshit insane and impenetrable unless you've spent 20 years learning it. Usually I lean towards the latter though, and this is supported by the fact that I've never seen anybody not employed by Wolfram do this kind of thing. See also: http://blog.wolfram.c…
Because of this you can just throw things together and get great results, where in other systems you might need to use external libraries or otherwise have to deal with high-ceremony architecture (I'm looking at you, OOP).
So I think the difficulty for newcomers is recognizing that "there is no spoon" and that you're entirely welcome to just start flying around like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnuquqR7QOQ
The language itself is simple, I think. But I could see how the APL-ish/functional aspect of it could seem abstruse to new people.
Whenever I see Wolfram/Mathematica stuff like this, I'm not entirely sure if it's incredibly brilliant and will replace all computing as we know it, or completely batshit insane and impenetrable unless you've spent 20 years learning it. Usually I lean towards the latter though, and this is supported by the fact that I've never seen anybody not employed by Wolfram do this kind of thing. See also: http://blog.wolfram.c…
It uses raw lists as the data structure for everything (including code) and has enormous math/sci and presentation infrastructure. Every part of the system can easily talk to any other part of the system. Because of this you can just throw things together and get great results, where in other systems you might need to use external libraries or otherwise have to deal with high-ceremony architecture (I'm looking at you…
GeoGraphics[Text[Style["Hello!", 150]], GeoRange -> World]
In any other language, if I wanted to write some text on a graphic, I would find a routine to load an image into memory and another to render text into that memory. That's genuinely easy.
But in Wolfram's case, I'm apparently just supposed to know that there's something called "GeoGraphics" that does this kind of thing, that the text goes in a Style[] block (what?), and "GeoRange -> World" is how you tell it to create a worldmap as a background. WTF. And don't tell me "read the docs", because even if I found this, it wouldn't help me much with the rest:
Earlier, someone tried doing similar things with another calculator: http://www.hilarymason.com/blog/a-quick-twitter-bot-bc_l/
It's a little amusing to observe Twitter being used as a sort of "transport layer" for services because of how easy it is for people to use it; a few decades ago, to interact with a service you would probably open a TCP connection to it and communicate in a service-specific protocol. Later, that was largely replaced by the ubiquitous HTTP "web API", and now we see services built on services like Twitter which are alr…
It's a little amusing to observe Twitter being used as a sort of "transport layer" for services because of how easy it is for people to use it; a few decades ago, to interact with a service you would probably open a TCP connection to it and communicate in a service-specific protocol. Later, that was largely replaced by the ubiquitous HTTP "web API", and now we see services built on services like Twitter which are alr…