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Bombastic, long winded and narcissistic. On target for Stephen Wolfram. But, if you've used mathematica it is the closest thing we have right now to the star t

Bombastic, long winded and narcissistic. On target for Stephen Wolfram. But, if you've used mathematica it is the closest thing we have right now to the star trek computer. In a single line I can get solutions to complex problems that would take days in Ruby, Lisp or Haskell. It is the same distance again as Lisp is from C. In fact, many of the failures you see write-ups on HN I've been able to model and solve in a few minutes with MMA. In particular the rap genius Heroku queue issue.

tfb 13y ago
In a single line I can get solutions to complex problems that would take days in Ruby, Lisp or Haskell. It is the same distance again as Lisp is from C. In fact, many of the failures you see write-ups on HN I've been able to model and solve in a few minutes with MMA. In particular the rap genius Heroku queue issue. Can you elaborate and/or provide a thorough example of this? I'm curious.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- spitfire 13y ago
  Sure. During the rap genius debacle there were a bunch of people taking time to figure out what was wrong with Heroku's routing. I was entertained because there were two parts to the problem A) queueing and B) optimizations. So with a line of code you could represent heroku's queues and determine exactly how many dyne's you needed. Or, you could try different queueing methods and determine how much money you could have been saving. In some sense Mathematica is further down the What vs How line of language power. Even in ruby, Clojure or Haskell you're still left specifying HOW to do optimization, integration, etc. Not what you'd like to optimize, integrate or manipulate. [1] http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/QueueingProcesses.html http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/QueueingProce... [2] http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/Optimization.html http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/Optimization....
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - newman314 13y ago
    So what's this line of code?
    - spitfire 13y ago
      Well, here's a quick simulation assuming request servicing follows a Poisson process. The Manipulate function takes a function and generates an interactive version of that function. So in this case it has a graph (list plot) of the simulation, along with a slider to manipulate the number of new requests (arrivals). If you wanted to be ambitious, you could simulate different servicing distributions, and times. But that might add a whole 2-3 lines of code to the solution. http://imgur.com/66wczZu http://imgur.com/66wczZu Manipulate[ ListLinePlot[ RandomFunction[QueueingProcess[arrivals, 60/8] , {0, 50}][ "Path"]], {arrivals, 1, 30}]
      - tfb 13y ago
        So how does generating a graph actually solve the problem in the real world? Or am I misunderstanding what the problem is? I was assuming the problem was with some real world application, most likely regarding the implementation of some complex networking algorithm for Heroku's system. But if it's just some abstract math problem, of course it would make sense to use something like Mathematica, MATLAB, etc.
        spitfire 13y ago
        That was just to demonstrate the problem. You could solve it by using NSolve[expr, vars] and giving a limit for the response time you'd like. You'd get back the number of dyne's you'd need to meet those requirements. On heroku's side, you could model their network with a few lines of code and experiment with different types of queues to find things that work well and are affordable. As PG said in beating the averages, it's one o those things that's easy to dismiss when you're looking up the power curve.
mathattack 13y ago
What makes it so much more powerful than any other computing language?
- leephillips 13y ago
  This presentation [0] does a good job of showing what's special about the Mathematica language. I don't use it myself (closed source), but it is undeniably cool, powerful, and different. It turns out that Mathematica’s design has a conceptual elegance that makes it capable of a type of interaction that’s nothing short of astonishing in its flexibility and generality. [0] http://vimeo.com/44968627 http://vimeo.com/44968627
  - mathattack 13y ago
    Thanks for sharing!
zackmorris 13y ago
I have to generally agree here, although my experience has mostly been with Wolfram Alpha. I'm continually amazed at how easily it lets me grapple with optimization problems or solving for different variables (when I barely remember how to do them myself). However, Mathematica has always felt a bit niche to me. I wish it was more of an open source project like Octave, because I think the approach is awesome but too often I feel constrained by Wolfram's way of looking at things. If I could combine Matlab, Go, Python, Mathematica, Excel and (yikes) php for it's hands-on-get-@#!$-done-facility, that would be my ideal language.

tfb 13y ago

In a single line I can get solutions to complex problems that would take days in Ruby, Lisp or Haskell. It is the same distance again as Lisp is from C. In fact, many of the failures you see write-ups on HN I've been able to model and solve in a few minutes with MMA. In particular the rap genius Heroku queue issue. Can you elaborate and/or provide a thorough example of this? I'm curious.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
spitfire 13y ago
Sure. During the rap genius debacle there were a bunch of people taking time to figure out what was wrong with Heroku's routing. I was entertained because there were two parts to the problem A) queueing and B) optimizations. So with a line of code you could represent heroku's queues and determine exactly how many dyne's you needed. Or, you could try different queueing methods and determine how much money you could have been saving. In some sense Mathematica is further down the What vs How line of language power. Even in ruby, Clojure or Haskell you're still left specifying HOW to do optimization, integration, etc. Not what you'd like to optimize, integrate or manipulate. [1] http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/QueueingProcesses.html http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/QueueingProce... [2] http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/Optimization.html http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/Optimization....
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- newman314 13y ago
  So what's this line of code?
  - spitfire 13y ago
    Well, here's a quick simulation assuming request servicing follows a Poisson process. The Manipulate function takes a function and generates an interactive version of that function. So in this case it has a graph (list plot) of the simulation, along with a slider to manipulate the number of new requests (arrivals). If you wanted to be ambitious, you could simulate different servicing distributions, and times. But that might add a whole 2-3 lines of code to the solution. http://imgur.com/66wczZu http://imgur.com/66wczZu Manipulate[ ListLinePlot[ RandomFunction[QueueingProcess[arrivals, 60/8] , {0, 50}][ "Path"]], {arrivals, 1, 30}]
    - tfb 13y ago
      So how does generating a graph actually solve the problem in the real world? Or am I misunderstanding what the problem is? I was assuming the problem was with some real world application, most likely regarding the implementation of some complex networking algorithm for Heroku's system. But if it's just some abstract math problem, of course it would make sense to use something like Mathematica, MATLAB, etc.
      - spitfire 13y ago
        That was just to demonstrate the problem. You could solve it by using NSolve[expr, vars] and giving a limit for the response time you'd like. You'd get back the number of dyne's you'd need to meet those requirements. On heroku's side, you could model their network with a few lines of code and experiment with different types of queues to find things that work well and are affordable. As PG said in beating the averages, it's one o those things that's easy to dismiss when you're looking up the power curve.

mathattack 13y ago

What makes it so much more powerful than any other computing language?

leephillips 13y ago
This presentation [0] does a good job of showing what's special about the Mathematica language. I don't use it myself (closed source), but it is undeniably cool, powerful, and different. It turns out that Mathematica’s design has a conceptual elegance that makes it capable of a type of interaction that’s nothing short of astonishing in its flexibility and generality. [0] http://vimeo.com/44968627 http://vimeo.com/44968627
- mathattack 13y ago
  Thanks for sharing!

zackmorris 13y ago

I have to generally agree here, although my experience has mostly been with Wolfram Alpha. I'm continually amazed at how easily it lets me grapple with optimization problems or solving for different variables (when I barely remember how to do them myself). However, Mathematica has always felt a bit niche to me. I wish it was more of an open source project like Octave, because I think the approach is awesome but too often I feel constrained by Wolfram's way of looking at things. If I could combine Matlab, Go, Python, Mathematica, Excel and (yikes) php for it's hands-on-get-@#!$-done-facility, that would be my ideal language.