4 ms·

Here's a more hacker-ish explanation about what is different and cool about Mathematica: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4015695 https://news.ycombinator.c

• mietek 13y ago
  Thank you for this very interesting explanation. I've tried to get into Mathematica a couple years ago, but struggled. Can you suggest a good way to scale the learning curve?
  • taliesinb 13y ago
    We're acutely aware of this. It's always a challenge to onboard users to a tool this broad and deep. Refactoring our documentation a bit for M10 will help, the predictive interface in M9 helps, and there are some cool "code hint" ideas that are coming in M10 that will hopefully make it easier to keep learning. We'll also soon be launching a community site to make it easy to discuss functionality, seek answers, and share code. For now, http://mathematica.stackexchange.com http://mathematica.stackexchange.com is a good resource. We're also working on getting some materials about the Wolfram Language that should make it easier for people with existing programming experience to grok what is unique and different about WL, and how they might go about learning it. Probably the best resource remains the existing Mathematica documentation. It is vast -- containing for example more than 100,000 evaluatable code snippets that demonstrate each function being used in multiple ways. It is available online (http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/Mathematica.html http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/Mathematica.h...) as well as in-product (double-click function you want to know about, then press F1 or Cmd+Shift+F). Following hyperlinks from familiar territory can get you a long way. It's quite easy to get lost in it, of course, so here's a short list of "bread and butter" functions that I think every WL programmer should know really well: https://gist.github.com/taliesinb/5848321 https://gist.github.com/taliesinb/5848321 Lastly, here is an eclectic mix of guides that might serve as good 'anchors' for some documentation spelunking: http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/LanguageOverview.html http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/LanguageOverv... http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/RulesAndPatterns.html http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/RulesAndPatte... http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/Patterns.html http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/Patterns.html http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/StringPatterns.html http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/StringPattern... http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/tutorial/BlocksAndLocalValues.html http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/tutorial/BlocksAndL... http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/tutorial/LevelsInExpressions.html http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/tutorial/LevelsInEx... http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/tutorial/ApplyingFunctionsToPartsOfExpressions.html http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/tutorial/ApplyingFu... http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/tutorial/ManipulatingValueLists.html http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/tutorial/Manipulati... http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/tutorial/IntroductionToDynamic.html http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/tutorial/Introducti... http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/SymbolicGraphicsLanguage.html http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/SymbolicGraph... http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/Compile/tutorial/Overview.html http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/Compile/tutorial/Ov... http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/GraphsAndNetworks.html http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/GraphsAndNetw... http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/MatricesAndLinearAlgebra.html http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/MatricesAndLi...