5 ms·

Seconded. I made some designs for a graphical IDE like this years ago, but only on paper. I'm very happy to see someone else has done the hard work for me! I ho

by jsmcgd 15y ago

Seconded. I made some designs for a graphical IDE like this years ago, but only on paper. I'm very happy to see someone else has done the hard work for me! I hope they'll support other languages too.

spitfire 15y ago
It's funny, more and more I'm moving my work to Mathematica because it works sort of like this already. That, and it's as far along the power curve from python/ruby as python/ruby is from C.
- Arelius 15y ago
  What kind of work do you do? Moving the work from what language? Do you not worry about having to pay huge licensing fees to run your code elsewhere?
  - spitfire 15y ago
    Executive brief - Go high end, where the money is. Where results are valued. Licensing isn't an issue - $3K/year+libraries for development. A runtime player for Mathematica costs $300. You just have to pick your projects carefully - No rails todo apps. One recent project I worked on was auto segmentation and labelling of MRI images. Auto-segmentation was the easy part. Labelling however took several different approaches before I got something that works reliably.
    - Arelius 15y ago
      This sounds like the kind of work that most people I know would choose matlab for (image segmentation). I personally have never used either for such, but do you have any thoughts on the matter? Is Mathematica getting better at the things matlab used to be best at?
      - spitfire 15y ago
        It sort of comes down to what you're comfortable with. In this case, the strict image analysis parts were more minor compared to the real work. Also, Matlab seems to be stagnating, while Mathematica has been growing by leaps and bounds. Also, matlab doesn't have built in functionality for gui building, afaik. A lot of my other work is much less suited to matlab. Mathematica is certainly much better for multi-domain work, which matlab barely supports.
      - taliesinb 15y ago
        I think most people you are know are just ignorant of how much better Mathematica is. It's okay. People like to stick to what they know.
        Arelius 15y ago
        Being more of a software engineer than a mathematician, and having no MatLab experience, and more basic Mathematica experience. That is, in fact, the the impression that I get. But I still see people using MatLab what seems like more often, and have no weight to backup my claim. I suppose I could learn both and do research, but in general, that seems so less important than getting actual work done. One aspect that seems to be brought up about MatLab often is the community, it's often claimed, especially in the co punter vision world, that if an algorithm exists, it has an available implementation in MatLab source. Which seems significant.
- taliesinb 15y ago
  One neat thing about working with Mathematica in Eclipse is that successive clicking expands your selection 'outwards' up the syntax tree. It's an quite astoundingly useful feature for refactoring. I'm sure some LISP editors have this too, but in a m-expression language like Mathematica it seems like magic.
  - spitfire 15y ago
    Are you talking wolfram workbench or eclipse? (I don't have workbench). If eclipse has mms support I'll be trying that out tonight.
    - taliesinb 15y ago
      Ah, my bad. You can install it as an Eclipse plugin, but that seems to require access to an internal server. So guess you're stuck with the Workbench, our branded version of Eclipse, which requires "premier service". Sorry!
      - spitfire 15y ago
        Yeah. I don't have premier service. (When it says "call for quote" I leave) I'm guessing you work for wolfram? Is there a demo available somewhere?
  - gsg 15y ago
    When I was first learning elisp, one of the utilities I wrote was a flood-selection feature that sounds very similar to what you describe. Interestingly, it turned out to be quite useful in C code despite only being aware of string and paren (and brace and bracket) boundaries.
- rwallace 15y ago
  I've heard Mathematica praised before, but not in precisely those terms - I was under the impression it was more a DSL for mathematics. Can you give a few examples of things it can do that put it that far along the power curve relative to Python/Ruby?
  - taliesinb 15y ago
    Well, Wolfram|Alpha. I switch from computer vision to parsing to machine learning on a daily basis. But I haven't used the workhorse mathematics functions like Solve or Integrate in 3 years. Perhaps it would be better to call it a 'Domain General Language' for everything.
zokier 15y ago
Have you seen Code Bubbles? http://www.andrewbragdon.com/codebubbles_site.asp http://www.andrewbragdon.com/codebubbles_site.asp

by jsmcgd 15y ago

Seconded. I made some designs for a graphical IDE like this years ago, but only on paper. I'm very happy to see someone else has done the hard work for me! I hope they'll support other languages too.

spitfire 15y ago

It's funny, more and more I'm moving my work to Mathematica because it works sort of like this already. That, and it's as far along the power curve from python/ruby as python/ruby is from C.

Arelius 15y ago
What kind of work do you do? Moving the work from what language? Do you not worry about having to pay huge licensing fees to run your code elsewhere?
- spitfire 15y ago
  Executive brief - Go high end, where the money is. Where results are valued. Licensing isn't an issue - $3K/year+libraries for development. A runtime player for Mathematica costs $300. You just have to pick your projects carefully - No rails todo apps. One recent project I worked on was auto segmentation and labelling of MRI images. Auto-segmentation was the easy part. Labelling however took several different approaches before I got something that works reliably.
  - Arelius 15y ago
    This sounds like the kind of work that most people I know would choose matlab for (image segmentation). I personally have never used either for such, but do you have any thoughts on the matter? Is Mathematica getting better at the things matlab used to be best at?
    - spitfire 15y ago
      It sort of comes down to what you're comfortable with. In this case, the strict image analysis parts were more minor compared to the real work. Also, Matlab seems to be stagnating, while Mathematica has been growing by leaps and bounds. Also, matlab doesn't have built in functionality for gui building, afaik. A lot of my other work is much less suited to matlab. Mathematica is certainly much better for multi-domain work, which matlab barely supports.
    - taliesinb 15y ago
      I think most people you are know are just ignorant of how much better Mathematica is. It's okay. People like to stick to what they know.
      - Arelius 15y ago
        Being more of a software engineer than a mathematician, and having no MatLab experience, and more basic Mathematica experience. That is, in fact, the the impression that I get. But I still see people using MatLab what seems like more often, and have no weight to backup my claim. I suppose I could learn both and do research, but in general, that seems so less important than getting actual work done. One aspect that seems to be brought up about MatLab often is the community, it's often claimed, especially in the co punter vision world, that if an algorithm exists, it has an available implementation in MatLab source. Which seems significant.
taliesinb 15y ago
One neat thing about working with Mathematica in Eclipse is that successive clicking expands your selection 'outwards' up the syntax tree. It's an quite astoundingly useful feature for refactoring. I'm sure some LISP editors have this too, but in a m-expression language like Mathematica it seems like magic.
- spitfire 15y ago
  Are you talking wolfram workbench or eclipse? (I don't have workbench). If eclipse has mms support I'll be trying that out tonight.
  - taliesinb 15y ago
    Ah, my bad. You can install it as an Eclipse plugin, but that seems to require access to an internal server. So guess you're stuck with the Workbench, our branded version of Eclipse, which requires "premier service". Sorry!
    - spitfire 15y ago
      Yeah. I don't have premier service. (When it says "call for quote" I leave) I'm guessing you work for wolfram? Is there a demo available somewhere?
- gsg 15y ago
  When I was first learning elisp, one of the utilities I wrote was a flood-selection feature that sounds very similar to what you describe. Interestingly, it turned out to be quite useful in C code despite only being aware of string and paren (and brace and bracket) boundaries.
rwallace 15y ago
I've heard Mathematica praised before, but not in precisely those terms - I was under the impression it was more a DSL for mathematics. Can you give a few examples of things it can do that put it that far along the power curve relative to Python/Ruby?
- taliesinb 15y ago
  Well, Wolfram|Alpha. I switch from computer vision to parsing to machine learning on a daily basis. But I haven't used the workhorse mathematics functions like Solve or Integrate in 3 years. Perhaps it would be better to call it a 'Domain General Language' for everything.

zokier 15y ago

Have you seen Code Bubbles? http://www.andrewbragdon.com/codebubbles_site.asp http://www.andrewbragdon.com/codebubbles_site.asp