A New New Kind of Science?
Sounds like an amped up Wolfram Alpha so more like... A New Science Of Kinds.
Maybe Wolfram Alpha will receive a bunch of bug fixes and finally move up to Beta version?
Stephen Wolfram: Something Very Big Is Coming
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Re: Stephen Wolfram: Something Very Big Is Coming
#12If you don't have time to read all of the way through, the "coming soon" portion is ready to take your e-mail at http://www.wolframcloud.com.
Re: Stephen Wolfram: Something Very Big Is Coming
#13> In most languages there’s a sharp distinction between programs, and data, and the output of programs. Not so in the Wolfram Language. It’s all completely fluid. Data becomes algorithmic. Algorithms become data. There’s no distinction needed between code and data. And everything becomes both intrinsically scriptable, and intrinsically interactive. And there’s both a new level of interoperability, and a new level of modularity.
Sounds like Lisp :p
Re: Stephen Wolfram: Something Very Big Is Coming
#14[deleted]
Re: Stephen Wolfram: Something Very Big Is Coming
#15Oh yeah? Is it a new Segway?
That was the biggest "product release" disappointment I've had in my life. I was a naive kid ... huge fan of Kamen (actually, I still am a big fan of the man). IT was going to change everything!!! Bezos and a bunch of other big wigs are investing in it!!! I grew up a bit after that ...
If only they had followed Amazon's business model (screw the margins, and scale up as fast as possible) it might actually have taken off...
Re: Stephen Wolfram: Something Very Big Is Coming
#16One thing is for sure; clouds are gathering.
Winter is coming.
(... at least in the Northern Hemisphere)
Re: Stephen Wolfram: Something Very Big Is Coming
#17If you don't have time to read all of the way through, the "coming soon" portion is ready to take your e-mail at http://www.wolframcloud.com .
So is Wolfram Language: http://www.wolfram.com/wolfram-language/
Re: Stephen Wolfram: Something Very Big Is Coming
#18I may loose some karma here, but I could not decide if the post is pure genius or something written during the maniac phase of a bipolar disorder.
Re: Stephen Wolfram: Something Very Big Is Coming
#19I remember wolfram alpha being marketed pre-release as something that would make Google obsolete. The only reason I ever use this is for math when I do not have access to a native alternative such as matlab. Considering that I use less math than I used to, I wonder why it is still relevant.
Re: Stephen Wolfram: Something Very Big Is Coming
#20> In most languages there’s a sharp distinction between programs, and data, and the output of programs. Not so in the Wolfram Language. It’s all completely fluid. Data becomes algorithmic. Algorithms become data. There’s no distinction needed between code and data. And everything becomes both intrinsically scriptable, and intrinsically interactive. And there’s both a new level of interoperability, and a new level of…
It's a little beyond that, in some ways. In the LISPs, you can view programs as data, but macros are different from, say, 'if'. The Read and Evaluate parts of the REPL are distinct phases.
Whereas in Wolfram Language, If is just an ordinary symbol that has attribute HoldRest to ensure that it can prevent evaluation of its two clauses until it knows which one to evaluate.
In other words, code is just data (expression) that happens to have specific rules that will cause it to evaluate in some way, yielding a new expression (which could be more code, or partially evaluated code, or data, or whatever).
But you can also have rules attached to several symbols together. So for example, when you see a Foo containing a Bar, replace it with a Baz:
Foo[___, Bar, ___] := Baz;
There's one more twist, which is that everything is not just serializable, but in some sense it is its serialization (called FullForm). It's hard to explain what this means without playing around with stuff.
Also, the language has actual m-expressions, thank god, unlike most LISPs.