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Wow, nice demo. It is interesting to see Wolfram explain his vision for an "ultimate fusion language" -- a powerful multi-paradigm language, a huge standard lib
by gklitt 13y ago
Wow, nice demo. It is interesting to see Wolfram explain his vision for an "ultimate fusion language" -- a powerful multi-paradigm language, a huge standard library, data sources, and deployment all rolled into one. This monolithic approach seems to be the opposite of the Unix philosophy, and I wonder how that will play out.
There are clearly benefits to be gained from smooth integration, and the demo is impressive considering it only uses stuff built into the language. But there's also something to be said for letting different teams of people focus on building smaller and more focused tools which can be combined in a variety of ways. I worry that this Wolfram language will be limited in its usefulness for real applications because it simply tries to bite off too much.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- pjmlp 13y agoThis was the Lisp and Smalltalk development environments philosophy which offered a better developer experience than UNIX ever did. The little things together from UNIX was the functions and objects bundled together via the REPL, with added capability to dynamically change the environment.
- coldtea 13y ago>This monolithic approach seems to be the opposite of the Unix philosophy, and I wonder how that will play out. Well, it's not like the Unix philosophy is the only game in town, or has been proven best, or anything. Emacs, for one, is anything but Unix philosophy, but it's still a very good tool. And such things are "monolithic" only if you consider an executable as the only possible unit of isolation. You can have other ways to modularize stuff. E.g a full featured huge program can have modules, plugins, etc that "do a thing and do it well". Just because it can do what 100 unix utilities can do combined, doesn't mean it's monolithic into how it's internally structured.