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I find it amusing that many people (seemingly Hackers) concentrate on Wolfram's ego rather than on the actual thing at hand. I don't care about egos, lipstick c

by jwr 13y ago

I find it amusing that many people (seemingly Hackers) concentrate on Wolfram's ego rather than on the actual thing at hand. I don't care about egos, lipstick color, or the pants the language creator wears. I care about the language, so let's talk about it now: From a long-time Mathematica user: this is not a language I like. I use it, but there is little to no fun. Many things aren't immediately clear or become problematic if you stop using the language for a while. As an example, quick, what is the difference between Module[], Block[] and With[]? Even if you remember that With[] is a lexical scoping construct, Module[] and Block[] can be confusing. It doesn't help that Mathematica is absolutely horrible for debugging code. I don't know why they put so little emphasis on their REPL, but it's way behind the times. Even mismatched parentheses can cause serious pain (and I hate the fact that things move around when I edit parentheses). That said, I have a lot of respect for Mathematica as a complete system. It is incredibly useful, most mathematical tools you will ever need are there. It is also a great tool for explorative data analysis. Have a pile of data you'd like to see patterns in? Load it up, mash it into shape with high-level functions, then quickly produce great-looking graphics. Nothing even comes close to the flexibility of Mathematica here.

maaku 13y ago
Because ego blinds one to effective criticism. And the criticism many of us have with Wolfram products is that while smart in limited domains, they can be blindingly stupid in others (your various examples providing evidence for this). If he listened to and respected our complaints, maybe we'd have a better product. But no.
- taliesinb 13y ago
  Not really. Stephen knows how poor our debugging facilities are (and I regularly tell him how bad the situation is) -- we've just had limited bandwidth to actually fix it properly to our satisfaction. Luckily I have a totally revamped debugging and logging system that will put us ahead of the curve here (imagine DTrace at a program level). Probably a point release of V10. Same goes with multiple undo and retina support -- we know how embarrassing their absence is, and we've luckily been able to fix these for v10. I've been in design meetings where the multiple undo has bumped several other desirable features off our roadmap.
  - lgarron 13y ago
    ...and the ability to actually abort long computations? ;-)
    - taliesinb 13y ago
      Yes! At least triple-abort should kill the kernel! P.s. hi again!
  - spitfire 13y ago
    How about hashmaps, something like records and other constructs for building large, long lived applications. I'd kill for hashmaps, some sort of records and strong typing in Mathematica.
    - trurl42 13y ago
      Here are your hashmaps: https://reference.wolfram.com/language/guide/Associations.html https://reference.wolfram.com/language/guide/Associations.ht...
      - spitfire 13y ago
        Awesome. Is this a new thing? I can't find it in the Mathematica 9 documentation. So now there's just strong types and something like records left for me for general purpose development.
        trurl42 13y ago
        Yep, they are marked as new here: https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/Association.html https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/Association.html
        statusgraph 13y ago
        They've existed in a significantly more powerful form as DownValues since Mathematica's release.
    - 13y ago
chaostheory 13y ago
If this thing is actually great, I feel that the license is important. If it's too restrictive, what's the point? We're not living in the 80s.
nswanberg 13y ago
Not sure if you just want commiseration and are just having trouble remembering which keyword is which, so I apologize if I'm explaining too much, but for me deciding which to use is more grappling with the difference between dynamic and lexical scoping rather than which concept maps to which keyword, and just as knowing more about a person seems to help me remember their name, so too does knowing more about the function help me remember its name. What helped me straighten it out was to evaluate the examples here with Trace: http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/tutorial/BlocksComparedWithModules.html http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/tutorial/BlocksComp... In[1]:= m=i^2 Out[1]= i^2 In[2]:= Block[{i=a},i+m] Out[2]= a+a^2 In[3]:= Module[{i=a},i+m] Out[3]= a+i^2 In[4]:= Block[{i=a},i + m] // Trace Out[4]= {Block[{i=a},i+m],{i=a,a},{{i,a},{m,i^2,{i,a},a^2},a+a^2},a+a^2} In[5]:= Module[{i=a},i+m]//Trace Out[5]= {Module[{i=a},i+m],{i$5592=a,a},{{i$5592,a},{m,i^2},a+i^2},a+i^2} It's a bit dense to read through but with Block, "i" has been assigned the value "a", but still remains in the form "i" throughout the evaluation, and once "m" is replaced with "i^2", the "i" is seen and replaced with "a", acting as normal dynamic scoping. In Module, however, "i" is replaced by a temporary variable with the form "i$5592", which does not have a definition anywhere in Mathematica, so when "m" is evaluated, "i" is left alone, which is how lexical scoping acts. I dislike forgetting parts of languages in the ones I use. C# is full of things whose behavior I have to look up, as is javascript, python, and especially while I'm learning them: clojure and cljs. But what's nice about this language is that these two concepts, Module and Block, while having different meaning, have the same form.
59nadir 13y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the ego of the language creators seems to shine through in at least this[0] reference page, though. The most important bit I'd like to get some clarification on: > Long viewed as an important theoretical idea, functional programming finally became truly convenient and practical > with the introduction of the Wolfram Language. Treating expressions like as both symbolic data and the application > of a function provides a uniquely powerful way to integrate structure and function—and an efficient, elegant > representation of many common computations. I see nothing on the reference page that could be said to make Wolfram's FP constructs more convenient or practical. They make it sound like FP was a long lost dream but then Wolfram came along and actually made it happen. They're seemingly using the exact same constructs as everyone else. What you do actually get from the reference page, though, is that they went the Haskell route and decided the FP stuff shouldn't be readable by anyone who hasn't used the language before. This is all fine and dandy, really; it's a model as good as any other, since it at least gives writability where it loses readability... They aren't doing anything new, from the looks of it, though. They seem to be doing precisely the opposite... In exactly the same way. [0] - https://reference.wolfram.com/language/guide/FunctionalProgramming.html https://reference.wolfram.com/language/guide/FunctionalProgr...

by jwr 13y ago

maaku 13y ago

Because ego blinds one to effective criticism. And the criticism many of us have with Wolfram products is that while smart in limited domains, they can be blindingly stupid in others (your various examples providing evidence for this). If he listened to and respected our complaints, maybe we'd have a better product. But no.

taliesinb 13y ago
Not really. Stephen knows how poor our debugging facilities are (and I regularly tell him how bad the situation is) -- we've just had limited bandwidth to actually fix it properly to our satisfaction. Luckily I have a totally revamped debugging and logging system that will put us ahead of the curve here (imagine DTrace at a program level). Probably a point release of V10. Same goes with multiple undo and retina support -- we know how embarrassing their absence is, and we've luckily been able to fix these for v10. I've been in design meetings where the multiple undo has bumped several other desirable features off our roadmap.
- lgarron 13y ago
  ...and the ability to actually abort long computations? ;-)
  - taliesinb 13y ago
    Yes! At least triple-abort should kill the kernel! P.s. hi again!
- spitfire 13y ago
  How about hashmaps, something like records and other constructs for building large, long lived applications. I'd kill for hashmaps, some sort of records and strong typing in Mathematica.
  - trurl42 13y ago
    Here are your hashmaps: https://reference.wolfram.com/language/guide/Associations.html https://reference.wolfram.com/language/guide/Associations.ht...
    - spitfire 13y ago
      Awesome. Is this a new thing? I can't find it in the Mathematica 9 documentation. So now there's just strong types and something like records left for me for general purpose development.
      - trurl42 13y ago
        Yep, they are marked as new here: https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/Association.html https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/Association.html
      - statusgraph 13y ago
        They've existed in a significantly more powerful form as DownValues since Mathematica's release.
  - 13y ago

chaostheory 13y ago

If this thing is actually great, I feel that the license is important. If it's too restrictive, what's the point? We're not living in the 80s.

nswanberg 13y ago

Not sure if you just want commiseration and are just having trouble remembering which keyword is which, so I apologize if I'm explaining too much, but for me deciding which to use is more grappling with the difference between dynamic and lexical scoping rather than which concept maps to which keyword, and just as knowing more about a person seems to help me remember their name, so too does knowing more about the function help me remember its name. What helped me straighten it out was to evaluate the examples here with Trace: http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/tutorial/BlocksComparedWithModules.html http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/tutorial/BlocksComp... In[1]:= m=i^2 Out[1]= i^2 In[2]:= Block[{i=a},i+m] Out[2]= a+a^2 In[3]:= Module[{i=a},i+m] Out[3]= a+i^2 In[4]:= Block[{i=a},i + m] // Trace Out[4]= {Block[{i=a},i+m],{i=a,a},{{i,a},{m,i^2,{i,a},a^2},a+a^2},a+a^2} In[5]:= Module[{i=a},i+m]//Trace Out[5]= {Module[{i=a},i+m],{i$5592=a,a},{{i$5592,a},{m,i^2},a+i^2},a+i^2} It's a bit dense to read through but with Block, "i" has been assigned the value "a", but still remains in the form "i" throughout the evaluation, and once "m" is replaced with "i^2", the "i" is seen and replaced with "a", acting as normal dynamic scoping. In Module, however, "i" is replaced by a temporary variable with the form "i$5592", which does not have a definition anywhere in Mathematica, so when "m" is evaluated, "i" is left alone, which is how lexical scoping acts. I dislike forgetting parts of languages in the ones I use. C# is full of things whose behavior I have to look up, as is javascript, python, and especially while I'm learning them: clojure and cljs. But what's nice about this language is that these two concepts, Module and Block, while having different meaning, have the same form.

59nadir 13y ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the ego of the language creators seems to shine through in at least this[0] reference page, though. The most important bit I'd like to get some clarification on: > Long viewed as an important theoretical idea, functional programming finally became truly convenient and practical > with the introduction of the Wolfram Language. Treating expressions like as both symbolic data and the application > of a function provides a uniquely powerful way to integrate structure and function—and an efficient, elegant > representation of many common computations. I see nothing on the reference page that could be said to make Wolfram's FP constructs more convenient or practical. They make it sound like FP was a long lost dream but then Wolfram came along and actually made it happen. They're seemingly using the exact same constructs as everyone else. What you do actually get from the reference page, though, is that they went the Haskell route and decided the FP stuff shouldn't be readable by anyone who hasn't used the language before. This is all fine and dandy, really; it's a model as good as any other, since it at least gives writability where it loses readability... They aren't doing anything new, from the looks of it, though. They seem to be doing precisely the opposite... In exactly the same way. [0] - https://reference.wolfram.com/language/guide/FunctionalProgramming.html https://reference.wolfram.com/language/guide/FunctionalProgr...