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Stephen Wolfram: Something Very Big Is Coming
- nfoz 13y agoOh yeah? Is it a new Segway?
- throwaway1979 13y agoThat was the biggest "product release" disappointment I've had in my life. I was a naive kid ... huge fan of Kamen (actually, I still am a big fan of the man). IT was going to change everything!!! Bezos and a bunch of other big wigs are investing in it!!! I grew up a bit after that ...
- happycube 13y agoIf only they had followed Amazon's business model (screw the margins, and scale up as fast as possible) it might actually have taken off...
- throwaway1979 13y agoI didn't have as big of an issue with the business model than I had with the product itself. Seriously ... what happens when it rains? How do you navigate pedestrian-dense sidewalks? I'm not George W. but I have managed to crash one.
- protomyth 13y agoGWB wasn't told the important tip of turning the damn thing on which, for a demo, told me the company had no marketing sense. If you get POTUS with your product, you nail the damn demo or just close the company. GWB is a pretty athletic guy and they couldn't get the demo right. It goes with the Tonight Show appearance that is probably the single best sales pitch except for the Segway rep trying to play nanny with Jay Leno, Russell Crowe, and Sting with Russell Crowe promoting Gladiator and yelling lines from the movie.
- Anon84 13y agoA New New Kind of Science?
- bsdetector 13y agoSounds like an amped up Wolfram Alpha so more like... A New Science Of Kinds.
- Anon84 13y agoMaybe Wolfram Alpha will receive a bunch of bug fixes and finally move up to Beta version? </joke>
- headgasket 13y agoOne thing is for sure; clouds are gathering.
- happycube 13y agoWinter is coming. (... at least in the Northern Hemisphere)
- mprat 13y agoIs the language Mathematica and Wolfram | Alpha now use not called the Wolfram Language?
- quchen 13y agoThe Mathematica language is usually simply referred to as "Mathematica", at least from what I can tell from my experience on mathematica.stackoverflow.com. Probably because the only frontend that allows doing actual work is the Mathematica software (excluding development of own modules).
- nickmain 13y agoExisting discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6726070 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6726070
- th0ma5 13y agoSounds to me a little like the Semantic Web and something like Heroku together as a cohesive system. Sounds okay!
- james33 13y agoIf you don't have time to read all of the way through, the "coming soon" portion is ready to take your e-mail at http://www.wolframcloud.com http://www.wolframcloud.com.
- rohitv 13y agoSo is Wolfram Language: http://www.wolfram.com/wolfram-language/ http://www.wolfram.com/wolfram-language/
- mck- 13y ago> In most languages there’s a sharp distinction between programs, and data, and the output of programs. Not so in the Wolfram Language. It’s all completely fluid. Data becomes algorithmic. Algorithms become data. There’s no distinction needed between code and data. And everything becomes both intrinsically scriptable, and intrinsically interactive. And there’s both a new level of interoperability, and a new level of modularity. Sounds like Lisp :p
- taliesinb 13y agoIt's a little beyond that, in some ways. In the LISPs, you can view programs as data, but macros are different from, say, 'if'. The Read and Evaluate parts of the REPL are distinct phases. Whereas in Wolfram Language, If is just an ordinary symbol that has attribute HoldRest to ensure that it can prevent evaluation of its two clauses until it knows which one to evaluate. In other words, code is just data (expression) that happens to have specific rules that will cause it to evaluate in some way, yielding a new expression (which could be more code, or partially evaluated code, or data, or whatever). But you can also have rules attached to several symbols together. So for example, when you see a Foo containing a Bar, replace it with a Baz: Foo[___, Bar, ___] := Baz; It's a little like multiple dispatch, but it is slightly more general than even that. And totally pattern based (the pattern language is ridiculously rich). There's one more twist, which is that everything is not just serializable, but in some sense it is its serialization (called FullForm). It's hard to explain what this means without playing around with stuff. Also, the language has actual m-expressions, thank god, unlike most LISPs.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- scardine 13y agoI may loose some karma here, but I could not decide if the post is pure genius or something written during the maniac phase of a bipolar disorder.
- lhnz 13y agoOften there's no difference.
- Zarathust 13y agoI remember wolfram alpha being marketed pre-release as something that would make Google obsolete. The only reason I ever use this is for math when I do not have access to a native alternative such as matlab. Considering that I use less math than I used to, I wonder why it is still relevant.
- mVChr 13y agoDoes "embeddable programs everywhere" [paraphrase] sound like a maintenance nightmare to anyone else?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- Vektorweg 13y agoProlog 2.0 , big database included!
- bfwork 13y agoMathematica finally gets undo?
- tmikaeld 13y agoIt sounds VERY locked to the Wolfram cloud platform and NOT very open sourced… Just makes me think about Oracle type of lock-ins immediately :P
- agos 13y agoReminds me of Brett Victor's “The future of programming” (http://vimeo.com/71278954 http://vimeo.com/71278954), “Learnable Programming” (http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/ http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/) and “Inventing on principle” (http://vimeo.com/36579366 http://vimeo.com/36579366)
- kineticfocus 13y agoReminds me of Wolfram's earlier book... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Kind_of_Science http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Kind_of_Science