4 ms·

I'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

I'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 ago
From 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 ago
  It 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 ago
    Another 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 ago
  That'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.
mtrpcic 12y ago
A large part of what's impressive about the language isn't the language, it's that it's tied together so many different data sources from around the globe that it can generate information that would be a nightmare to do manually.
- th0ma5 12y ago
  This still looks like a nightmare. No discoverability, no namespaces, no metadata management... these are all implemented in knowledge management systems, but this thing, whatever it is (not a language, not a knowledgebase, maybe a collection of pre-scripted demo applications?) has none of this.
rtkwe 12y ago
The language itself is not the exciting bit really, it's the data and processing APIs that it integrates with. They're taking care of a lot of information gathering for your through that integration which is pretty neat.

michael_fine 12y ago

From 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 ago
It 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 ago
  Another 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 ago
That'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.

mtrpcic 12y ago

A large part of what's impressive about the language isn't the language, it's that it's tied together so many different data sources from around the globe that it can generate information that would be a nightmare to do manually.

th0ma5 12y ago
This still looks like a nightmare. No discoverability, no namespaces, no metadata management... these are all implemented in knowledge management systems, but this thing, whatever it is (not a language, not a knowledgebase, maybe a collection of pre-scripted demo applications?) has none of this.

rtkwe 12y ago

The language itself is not the exciting bit really, it's the data and processing APIs that it integrates with. They're taking care of a lot of information gathering for your through that integration which is pretty neat.