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Comment by tedsanders | Hacker News Reader

Could you give some more detail on how it failed to power Wolfram Alpha? Did they switch to an alternate language?

Mathematica for handling data aggregation, recursive descent parsing, and tasks well suited for it, while the rest is an enormous codebase of compiled and JVM languages stitched together with Mathematica. Such projects are referred to as the "mud bowl", where when something breaks you just have to throw more mud at it.

> recursive descent parsing

The parser is Java, actually. And it's not recursive descent.

> tasks well suited for it

Fancy that! Using a language for things it is well suited to! :)

> compiled and JVM languages stitched together with Mathematica

A lot of stuff is still WL though. Data curation, evaluation, scanning, typesetting, formatting, and, you know, the actual computation in doing something like http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=regression+of+literacy%...

But it seems like you're complaining the backend isn't written in Wolfram Language? The JVM is great at that stuff! I don't call that ball-of-mud at all, just using the right tool for the job.

So, I'm curious, is that similar to what Wolfram Cloud will provide? To me, it sounds like a service that will run your Wolfram Language code in the cloud, just like Wolfram Alpha runs it in the cloud as part of its backend. Is that accurate?

Sorry for being inaccurate Tali, you're right about the parsing and the other areas where WL is being used. It's been a while since I poked around WA.

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