8 ms·
Introducing Tweet-a-Program
- vishalzone2002 12y agousing twitter as a compiler(as a service) is pretty cool
- ChuckMcM 12y agoI think it would be more interesting if you could dynamically create twitter bots. Then you could create a functional language in which tweets were expressions. Then you build the functional tree for your program and then tweet to its root node to execute it.
- taliesinb 12y agoThat's a really fun idea. You'd be able to see the execution of the sub-parts of the program by watching the sub-bots tweet results between themselves.
- smoyer 12y agoI've got code working for both Twitter and Jabber bots ... Would anyone be interested in working on this for fun?
- kaoD 12y agoI would, but how would you dynamically create twitter bots? Just create a swarm a make them reprogramable?
- smoyer 12y agoI was thinking that we could run completely independent twitter bots that performed some function, (a low-level programming language function or some higher-level library function), then collaborate on a service that provided a function catalog. New functions could then be built using the lower-level building blocks.
- rhodin 12y agoSome ideas and hacks to use to get a lot of Wolfram language into a tweet: http://blog.wolfram.com/2010/12/17/the-mathematica-one-liner-competition/ http://blog.wolfram.com/2010/12/17/the-mathematica-one-liner...
- jpatokal 12y agoWhenever I see Wolfram/Mathematica stuff like this, I'm not entirely sure if it's incredibly brilliant and will replace all computing as we know it, or completely batshit insane and impenetrable unless you've spent 20 years learning it. Usually I lean towards the latter though, and this is supported by the fact that I've never seen anybody not employed by Wolfram do this kind of thing. See also: http://blog.wolfram.com/2014/08/19/which-is-closer-local-beer-or-local-whiskey http://blog.wolfram.com/2014/08/19/which-is-closer-local-bee...
- taliesinb 12y agoPartly this is because we're so niche still that there just there just isn't a huge audience of developers to write large programs in WL yet, barring exceptions like [0]. I have no doubt that HN readers could do some amazing things in WL if they invested a modest amount of time in learning it. [0] Emerald Therapeutics: http://emeraldcloudlab.com/ http://emeraldcloudlab.com/
- treelovinhippie 12y agoCloud laboratory is so cool. I've also thought you could launch some amazing startups off the back of Wolfram Alpha language. But yeah quite a steep learning curve
- tragomaskhalos 12y agoTime isn't the only investment required though is it? How much is even a single-seat licence?
- rtkwe 12y ago300$ for just the software. Access to their data api's cost ~1k$ to start now with the desktop software.
- notreadbyhumans 12y agoI got sick of trying to get a price out of them for calls to their API. Not having a 'pricing' tab puts people off from the get-go and dealing with their sales people is a drag: all that technology and they can't even formulate a pricing calculator?!?
- nthitz 12y agoI want to get excited about Wolfram and Mathematica again. All of their blog posts are rather informative great reads. But then I head over to the pricing page and am reminded of why I love open source tools.
- MadManE 12y agoI think that for the most part, you get what you pay for. Mathematica is expensive, but it is awesome. I'm not sure that it's easy enough to use for the price point they are asking, but it's definitely better than the free options.
- ilaksh 12y agoWolfram Online is only $15 per month now for individuals.
- taliesinb 12y agoThe Wolfram Programming Cloud even has a free tier. The online IDE does not have quite as smooth an experience as the desktop IDE, however. https://programming.wolframcloud.com/ https://programming.wolframcloud.com/
- pr_fancycorn 12y agoIf it's about "ethics", that makes sense. But if price is what prevents, say, a software dude in the bay area from trying out Mathematica, well that's just l, o, l; i, m, o.
- themodelplumber 12y agoHm, I (@circular) am 1-2 against the monolith. Could be more helpful but I can see the showing-off-on-twitter potential.
- jedanbik 12y agoI love the work this company produces (especially Wolfram Alpha), but jeez, can't this guy give his employees some credit? People thought Jobs had an ego...
- echoes 12y agoAhh! I went to his SXSW talk this year and was absolutely entranced with the Wolfram language. It seemed like a real step forward in innovative thinking and actual "natural language" programming, but I was sad it's proprietary. I think the power of it is really undervalued - using all the knowledge of the wolfram-alpha engine to create objects? Such a neat idea! Imagine if Google built a similar language based on their search engine data - the kinds of programs people could build and might accidentally build just playing around boggle the mind.
- taliesinb 12y agoIn some sense it is surprising that Google hasn't done this already. After all, Mozilla has seen fit to work on Rust, which will soon replace C++ (god willing). But if you're organizing the world's information, don't you need a programming language that can work with that information in a first-class way?
- pjmlp 12y ago> which will soon replace C++ In what sense? If you mean traditional business software, maybe. If you mean real systems programming, OS drivers and such, only when an OS vendor integrates it into their SDK. That is how C and later on C++, pushed away all the other alternatives for systems programming.
- pjmlp 12y agoWe had it already, but the world wasn't prepared for it. I experienced the same feeling when I got to work in Smalltalk back in 1996 and a few years ago started gathering information about Lisp machines and the systems developed at Xerox PARC.
- taliesinb 12y agoI just did a WL equivalent of those Pi shirts you sometimes see: https://twitter.com/wolframtap/status/512754733476352000 https://twitter.com/wolframtap/status/512754733476352000
- pmalynin 12y agoTweetgram?
- blergh123 12y agoI'd really like an explanation of what's so amazing about this language. I saw the closing keynote today at Strangeloop and I can't understand why people are so excited. The language is proprietary and I don't feel like it's something I would actually use myself. The impression I got was that this project is an inventor's dream, which he has obviously obsessed over for some time, and it is an impressive feat, it just comes across as self centered and I have trouble understanding who might use the language and why..
- michael_fine 12y agoFrom what I can tell, it seems like a quirky lisp with a great set of libraries, and a very integrated IDE. Is there more to it?
- taliesinb 12y agoIt also has knowledge about the world... So here for example we're training a image classifier to distinguish paintings by different artists: https://www.wolframcloud.com/objects/051a4cda-5c0e-423b-8872-533b4af46469 https://www.wolframcloud.com/objects/051a4cda-5c0e-423b-8872... I don't think there's another language you could use to do that in ~5 minutes.
- taliesinb 12y agoAnother example, to show off: By running this code: CloudDeploy[ FormFunction[ "text" -> "String", Classify["FacebookTopic", #text, "TopProbabilities"] &, "JSON" ], Permissions -> "Public" ] I get a web form that can be used to enter arbitrary text and have social media topic inferred on it: https://www.wolframcloud.com/objects/0cda973b-8e12-43d7-a9d3-e32b94a58b74 https://www.wolframcloud.com/objects/0cda973b-8e12-43d7-a9d3... Try something like "I just had the most amazing meal at Four Burgers today".
- pr_fancycorn 12y agoThat's about right. It's somewhat of a superset of most languages, with Lisp chosen as its programmatic subset of choice. And its libraries are huge. Something like a few thousand functions. And the IDE uses the same language, so you can programmatically construct UIs. The key in all of this is that everything uses the same data structure. In previous versions the data stuff was not impressive, but with the recent versions it's starting to come into par with the rest of the language.
- arikrak 12y agoPretty good marketing move on their part. Though it could also be useful when you need an math/data image generated.
- empressplay 12y agoHm. I thought running a bot on Twitter was against their TOS? Anyone know any better on this one? I'd love to run a chatbot on Twitter =)
- init0 12y agoI tried fib(100000) and it works!
- abava 12y agoCheck out 411 for Twitter in this connection. Your own code behind tweets: http://t411.linkstore.ru http://t411.linkstore.ru
- nebula 12y agoTheir twitter bot seems to have gone crazy. It keeps sending the results for my program again and again. Think there is a bug in the bot, and it is picking up old tweets again from the timeline.
- userbinator 12y agoIt's a little amusing to observe Twitter being used as a sort of "transport layer" for services because of how easy it is for people to use it; a few decades ago, to interact with a service you would probably open a TCP connection to it and communicate in a service-specific protocol. Later, that was largely replaced by the ubiquitous HTTP "web API", and now we see services built on services like Twitter which are already using a HTTP-based API. Earlier, someone tried doing similar things with another calculator: http://www.hilarymason.com/blog/a-quick-twitter-bot-bc_l/ http://www.hilarymason.com/blog/a-quick-twitter-bot-bc_l/
- xamdam 12y agoClever