What Should We Call the Language of Mathematica? | Hacker News Reader

What Should We Call the Language of Mathematica?

blog.stephenwolfram.com

30 pointsmh_50 comments

Without even reading it (and avoiding looking at the comments here), I predict that he'll advocate 'Wolfram'.

Edit: Yep... http://imgur.com/KRyN97S.png

I love the ramp up, first it's just mentioning that the name of the company is Wolfram... then going underground before coming out, in bold, with Wolfram Language, then four paragraphs before concluding that "At this point, we pretty much have to have 'wolfram'—or at least some hint of it—in the name." and there goes the rest of the article.

Why not just call it Wolfram and be done with it. We know there's a big ego involved and we can't possibly bear Stephen Wolfram strain himself so much as to not name the language after himself. Anything else would be inhumane :)

And considering the good he's done with both the quality product Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha, it's only justified.

He also advanced several other permutations of it.

Am I missing something or is that just a surreal picture?

I think it's marking the positions of the word 'Wolfram' on the document.

Wolfram has written a lot of egotistical, boring things before. I have to give it to him: this time he's outdone himself.

Why not just outsource the naming to a flunky and then take credit for it if s/he comes up with a good one?

As far as I was aware everybody was already calling this language "Mathematica".

With projects like Mathics[1], that aim for Language compatibility with Mathematica, on the horizon it makes sense to want to separate the language from the implementation.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5196551

Seeing this post hit HN just a few days after Mathics gave me a paranoid feeling. Why now? Is Wolfram feeling the heat and looking for a new trademark to deny his competitors?

And Mathematica 9 just came out, so maybe it was Mathics feeling the heat! Despite the vacuum-like nature of our internal HN-eval-post loop, the rest of the world isn't standing still. It's actually a little surprising that they're only talking about this now, given how long Mathematica has been around.

I understand that this makes sense for Mathics. What I don't understand is why Wolfram has any interest in separating the language from the implementation.

It's worth noting that the developer of Mathics joined Wolfram recently. Might be related...

good post, but it seemed like he dismissed "tungsten" far too lightly ("And in the direction of whimsical, there are also words like Tungsten"). it seems like the best choice to me - it has the "wolfram" association, as well as fitting in with the general mineral theme while differentiating itself from the gemstone cluster. also it's easy to pronounce and rolls off the tongue fairly readily.

You beat me by one minute. Tungsten works for me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tungsten - "Tungsten, also known as wolfram... the free element is remarkable for its robustness, especially the fact that it has the highest melting point of all the non-alloyed metals and the second highest of all the elements after carbon. Also remarkable is its high density of 19.3 times that of water, comparable to that of uranium and gold, and much higher (about 1.7 times) than that of lead.... It is the heaviest element known to be used by any living organism."

Not bad.

Egotistica. (ld;o)

I wouldn't have been surprised to learn it were already named Lingua Mathematica, and I submit that as the best reason to give it that name (and not some other).

I thought the grammar might be wrong there, and it turns out, it is:

http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/103916/it-were-ve...

The corrected versions are: "I wouldn't have been surprised if it were already named Lingua Mathematica..." or "I wouldn't have been surprised to learn it was already named Lingua Mathematica..."

I propose "Stephen"

I have found Mathematica to be super simple learn and use, so by calling it "Stephen" it shows how friendly and approachable the language is while maintaining the connection to the founder's ego.

I've never heard anyone refer to Stephen Wolfram as "friendly and approachable," and naming the language based on that reason would be both amusing and disturbing.

I, for one, don't remember Mathematica being especially "friendly and approachable" either. Maybe for basic stuff, but my introduction to it was a grad-level computational neuroscience class, and it was the source of a great deal of misery in my life for a semester.

Maybe for amusement value it /should/ be named Stephen.

This is a common complaint, but I don't understand it. Most of my peers that didnt like it had no exposure to programming, though.

I have tried to teach myself Ruby and Python before but I have never gotten really far. I am pretty competent in Mathematica though. The key is getting used to their documentation center where they have lots of examples.

How about "Leibniz" in honor of the mathematician who independently invented calculus and, compared to Newton, used a superior notation (which he took great pains to make nice)

Or, Zinbiel.

I'd agree, but unfortunately "Leibniz" is not, nor does it rhyme with or even allude to "Wolfram" and is therefore out of the running.

I think Aleph is nice name. There is already Wolfram Alpha, and Aleph, while it is related to it, is IMO more appropriate for general purpose language.

It sounds to me mystical and abstract/mathematical at the same time as it reminds me of Blaise Pascal's definition of Nature (or God) as "an infinite sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere" (because Jorge Luis Borghes has a story with the same name in which he cites the Pascal's quote :)).

Wolfram prefers "Wolfram." Telling.

A New Kind of Language

One of the names he dismissed is actually a pretty good word to use to describe the blog post: Wolframble.

Ego.

There is already a programming language called W [1]. It's not related to the language of Mathematica but you could say has a little bit of relevance to scientific computing since it was created for the HP-95LX and the HP-200LX DOS-powered programmable calculators.

I used to have a decent collection of subroutines for it.

[1] http://www.vttoth.com/CMS/index.php/projects/49

I had the same idea only to read the comments to find that it had already been suggested.

There's already an language named M, which is even ANSI-standardised under that name. It's also known as MUMPS.

  f i=1:1:100 w ! w:'(i#3) "Fizz" w:'(i#5) "Buzz" w:'$x i

Whitespace matters in that. Kind of. Sometimes. Considering it has hardly changed since 1966, it's suprisingly usable - much more so than BASIC, for example, and includes a pre-relational (the marketing calls it post-relational now) B-Tree storage engine. And the biggest vendor has extended MUMPS with a Macro language to make it do SQL. Yep, it's a NoSQL engine that does SQL that's been around since 1966. There's no end to the silliness in that world :|

My December PLT Game's entry was actually called Wolf: https://github.com/JD557/Wolf

Thank god he didn't chose that name, then I would be the one that would need to think of a new language name.

Anyway, as stated in other comments, Tungsten seems like a nice choice.

1. Mathematica or 2. Just pick a random cool name, how about: pipe | (they use pipe in wolfram|alpha)

    > In the years since, the name Mathematica has been widely imitated (think Modelica, for example).

...or Metallica, for example.

Seriously, isn't sticking 'a' (or 'ica') onto the end of a word some kind of Latin thing?

Britannica!

    $ echo `grep ica$ /usr/dict/words`
    Africa America Angelica Antarctica Attica
    Britannica Corsica Dominica Erica Formica
    Jamaica Jessica Monica Patrica Podgorica
    Spica Veronica basilica erotica harmonica
    lexica mica pica replica sciatica silica

The Romans were just copying Stephen Wolfram.

They were pre-covering him. Like all the pre-covers of the songs from Glee....

As if Mathematica wasn't a frigging egotistical steal from Newton, Russell, and Whitehead.

To me, "language" implies freely available to use. This is not a critique of mathematica nor its pricing, but merely when I think of "computer language" I think of python or c++ or java etc.

Ask Umberto Eco http://books.google.co.uk/?id=2sDMxqbibS0C

FORMATH!

FORGREATJUSTICE!

I'll get me coat.

Why not return the favor and call it "Jobs"?

"Steve" would have been better, as a nod to both men.

Mathematicall

"Wolf"?

Wolfie ?

Mash

Weird, that's the name of a language I worked on at a former job. It was seriously awesome, it was like a functional version of Python mixed with assembly, and was much clearer and also faster than C++. Shame that it will probably never see the light of day (though I have plans for a similar replacement).

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