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Wolfram Language

reference.wolfram.com

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Re: Wolfram Language

#51

Post by RBerenguel »

colanderman wrote: post #37
muyuu wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A formal spec would be good enough too. But since he's specifying concrete output and graphics as part of the language, it's rather hard to specify binary-compatibility without a reference implementation. This is why there are no interpreted languages without a reference implementation that haven't failed miserably.

SQL, Prolog, Scheme, and VHDL seem to be doing just fine. And if you leave off the "interpreted" qualifier, which is (a) a property of an implementation, not a language, and (b) is rather meaningless anyway (can you actually define "interpreted"?), well, then C ought to count too.

APL, too

Re: Wolfram Language

#52

Post by rlx0x »

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_P9HqHVPeik "Stephen™ Wolfram™'s Introduction to the Wolfram™ Language"

That Wolfram™ Language and the Wolfram™ Cloud is going to change the world forever, the language is so great because its Wolfram™ Symbolic and since it all just runs in the Wolfram™ Cloud its really fast. You can put all your financial data in the Wolfram™ and do things. You know they worked 30 years on this, and it must be good because it runs in the Wolfram™ Cloud. Cloud Cloud Cloud Bla Bla Bla Bla Buy Buy Buy Wolfram™ Wolfram™ Wolfram™.

Re: Wolfram Language

#53

Post by primitivesuave »

rlx0x wrote: post #52

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_P9HqHVPeik "Stephen™ Wolfram™'s Introduction to the Wolfram™ Language" That Wolfram™ Language and the Wolfram™ Cloud is going to change the world forever, the language is so great because its Wolfram™ Symbolic and since it all just runs in the Wolfram™ Cloud its really fast. You can put all your financial data in the Wolfram™ and do things. You know they worked 30 years on this, and it…

I think he trademarked the word "Symbolic" as well.

Re: Wolfram Language

#54

Post by primitivesuave »

btown wrote: post #30

Serious question: How will memory management work for this? Not-so-serious corollary: How much RAM would a Wolfram wolf if a Wolfram would wolf RAM?

> How will memory management work for this?

There's a garbage collector, and the symbolic structure of the language makes it quite effective. You can also manually control the memory manager, one nice feature of Mathematica is how exposed it is.

http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/tutorial/MemoryMana...

> How much RAM would a Wolfram wolf if a Wolfram would wolf RAM?

Easily the funniest thing I've read on HN. You're my hero.

Re: Wolfram Language

#55

Post by primitivesuave »

carlob wrote: post #44
praseodym wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that the Mathematica editor still lacks a decent undo function: http://undo-for-mathematica.alaifari.com/undo-how-useless/

The v10 beta I have has it. So you won't have to wait much longer.

I'm on v10 beta as well, and it still remembers only one undo. Is it v10.0.0.0, or is there a newer release?

Re: Wolfram Language

#57

Post by jordigh »

muyuu wrote: post #17
colanderman wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Languages don't have source code, they have documentation. I haven't looked through it all, but this appears to be documentation specifying (to some degree) the Wolfram Language. Therefore the language exists, regardless of whether any implementations of interpreters or compilers thereof exist and are open-source.

A formal spec would be good enough too. But since he's specifying concrete output and graphics as part of the language, it's rather hard to specify binary-compatibility without a reference implementation. This is why there are no interpreted languages without a reference implementation that haven't failed miserably.

> This is why there are no interpreted languages without a reference implementation that haven't failed miserably.

Matlab? I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "reference implementation", though.

Re: Wolfram Language

#58

Post by super_mario »

tluyben2 wrote: post #16
oleganza wrote: post #14

When I was a student at university in 2003-2008, I loved, loved, loved Mathematica language, Mathematica uncluttered cell-based editor and rich interactive documentation. You could execute and edit examples right in the doc! I did so many things: nicely formatted pages (much easier to type in complex formulas than in LaTeX), computing simulations, crazy charts etc. I never could understand how people can use Matlab o…

Yeah I liked it as well; the notebook execution especially. Makes me sad to see how primitive iPython/iHaskell now are compared to the Mathematica editor almost 20 years ago. I hoped it would be the about same experience or better, but it's far from. Especially the web version for iHaskell (I assume the iPython web version is the same?) is horrible, absolutely horrible. But the idea is great and it is possible to mak…

I wish Mathematica had vi editing mode. As it is now editing the command line is stupid slow for someone who has lived in vim for 20 years now.

This is why I love IPython on the command line. Language is nicer too and editing is a breeze. Of course Python and available libraries are not much of a symbolic computing environment, but for the kinds of problems I deal with its faster to get things done than in Mathematica.

Re: Wolfram Language

#59

Post by rhodin »

sbrother wrote: post #50
snorkel wrote: post #39

This is not intended as a stand-alone language like Python but rather it's DSL dialect for integrating with Wolfram Alpha. You're basically using this dialect to get very specific results from the Wolfram Alpha service.

Not really. Wolfram Alpha is a pretty recent addition to the Wolfram product lineup, and Mathematica/"Wolfram Language" was very popular in academia before that. There wasn't even a direct way to access Alpha from Mathematica until Mathematica 9 (or maybe 8, I forget) and even now it's not a very commonly used feature. The Alpha API call limits (1000 per day for a professional license) pretty much prevent you from do…

"Commonly used" depends on who you ask. I use it all the time to help me look up units. It may not be 1000 calls/day, but it's still useful. Also the #/calls can be expanded with enterprise Mathematica.

It was added in Mathematica 8 (see bottom of http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/ref/WolframAlpha.ht..., "New in 8").

Disclaimer: I work for Wolfram Research

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