But, if you've used mathematica it is the closest thing we have right now to the star trek computer. In a single line I can get solutions to complex problems that would take days in Ruby, Lisp or Haskell. It is the same distance again as Lisp is from C.
In fact, many of the failures you see write-ups on HN I've been able to model and solve in a few minutes with MMA. In particular the rap genius Heroku queue issue.
In fact, many of the failures you see write-ups on HN I've been able to model and solve in a few minutes with MMA. In particular the rap genius Heroku queue issue.
Can you elaborate and/or provide a thorough example of this? I'm curious.
So with a line of code you could represent heroku's queues and determine exactly how many dyne's you needed. Or, you could try different queueing methods and determine how much money you could have been saving.
In some sense Mathematica is further down the What vs How line of language power. Even in ruby, Clojure or Haskell you're still left specifying HOW to do optimization, integration, etc. Not what you'd like to optimize, integrate or manipulate.
[1] http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/QueueingProce... [2] http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/Optimization....
If you wanted to be ambitious, you could simulate different servicing distributions, and times. But that might add a whole 2-3 lines of code to the solution.
Manipulate[ ListLinePlot[ RandomFunction[QueueingProcess[arrivals, 60/8] , {0, 50}][ "Path"]], {arrivals, 1, 30}]
On heroku's side, you could model their network with a few lines of code and experiment with different types of queues to find things that work well and are affordable.
As PG said in beating the averages, it's one o those things that's easy to dismiss when you're looking up the power curve.
However, Mathematica has always felt a bit niche to me. I wish it was more of an open source project like Octave, because I think the approach is awesome but too often I feel constrained by Wolfram's way of looking at things. If I could combine Matlab, Go, Python, Mathematica, Excel and (yikes) php for it's hands-on-get-@#!$-done-facility, that would be my ideal language.