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Love or hate Wolfram, the one thing that I find they do extremely well is make their language work well with consuming and working with a wide variety of data s

Love or hate Wolfram, the one thing that I find they do extremely well is make their language work well with consuming and working with a wide variety of data sets. Or put another way they don't just focus on making a general purpose programming language or even a math focused language, they actually work to make the language inter operate well with real world data sets. In my opinion they've passed Matlab and R in terms of being able to take a raw data set and quickly ask and answer questions about it and as someone who does this for a living I'm very happy Mathamatica exists, although R still wins in terms of cost:)

jkldotio 12y ago
I haven't used it but I have found most of these demos to look very staged and there is too much magic going on. Isn't the whole point of this to blur the lines between language and cloud so you are eternally dependent on their system and have to pay them when you need to seriously scale or deploy something?
- tokipin 12y ago
  it isn't magic, but simply the fact that the language is "dynamically typed" (or more accurately, that the whole system works symbolically). the "magic" is due to its UI compositing system using the same exact semantics as the rest of the language (or rather, it is the same language). this makes graphics-making and UI-making super easy. have a look at the Mathematica stack exchange[1] site to see more code. there isn't any contrivance there. [1] http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/graphics?sort=votes http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/graphi...
coliveira 12y ago
Wolfram language is very close to Lisp, which makes it an ideal tool to represent data and algorithms. I like the fact that they use a function representation that is similar to Prolog, so that you are free to choose between Lisp and Prolog techniques as desired.

jkldotio 12y ago

I haven't used it but I have found most of these demos to look very staged and there is too much magic going on. Isn't the whole point of this to blur the lines between language and cloud so you are eternally dependent on their system and have to pay them when you need to seriously scale or deploy something?

tokipin 12y ago
it isn't magic, but simply the fact that the language is "dynamically typed" (or more accurately, that the whole system works symbolically). the "magic" is due to its UI compositing system using the same exact semantics as the rest of the language (or rather, it is the same language). this makes graphics-making and UI-making super easy. have a look at the Mathematica stack exchange[1] site to see more code. there isn't any contrivance there. [1] http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/graphics?sort=votes http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/graphi...

coliveira 12y ago

Wolfram language is very close to Lisp, which makes it an ideal tool to represent data and algorithms. I like the fact that they use a function representation that is similar to Prolog, so that you are free to choose between Lisp and Prolog techniques as desired.