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> It’ll be very interesting to see if the symbolic programming model is as flexible as Wolfram claims and can truly take advantage of all of this data. Wolfram
by ktpsns 8y ago
> It’ll be very interesting to see if the symbolic programming model is as flexible as Wolfram claims and can truly take advantage of all of this data.
Wolfram could have implemented his large standard library also for any other ecosystem. The magic of this library (which goes along with Wolfram's Lisp dialect but is considered as a unit) is that it is extremely high level, allowing rapid application development. But as with most libraries, it could have been developed for any language/idiom, such as a traditional object oriented python.
- 4thaccount 8y agoMy 2 cents is that Mathematica and the Wolfram language are great for computational exploration (Ex: optimization, solving equations, plotting, statistics, calculus...etc etc). I think all the stuff that they really like to sell (Ex: the knowledge engine) are a gimmick. Yeah it can tell me how many calories are in spaghetti, but honestly...who cares? Normally, you would just get that in a dataset anyway which is more transparent. All my data is extremely private too, and they'll never have it available.
- ktpsns 8y agoThe explorative character of the MMA/Wolfram language is probably mostly due to the "REPL on stereoids". IPython provides a similar attempt but is "traditional" OOP (with explorable documentation and members/methods). Therefore, I am not that sure about the unique selling point of Mathematica. From my POV it is the pure size of the library and thus power of expression evaluation, like finding the algebraic solution to a complicated integral.