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Comment by auvi | Hacker News Reader

"THE WORLD'S HIGHEST LEVEL LANGUAGE" <-- based on what?

A report from the International Language-Level Assessment Body.

Seriously though, it doesn't seem too far-fetched a claim after seeing all the stuff demoed in the screencast they put out:

http://youtu.be/_P9HqHVPeik

Getting pedantic, I suppose there's a distinction between the language in isolation and with its stdlib/environment.

Looks like mathematica in a web browser to me. Probably cheaper as well.

So it's not all that high level. It is compared to Fortran and floats somewhere between R and Octave.

IMO, the only reason you would say that is that you either know nothing about Mathematica, or that your knowledge of it is very superficial (speaking as someone who uses it daily).

I actually used it for about 3 years (2009-2012) for stochastic modelling (insurance). We moved off the platform because to be honest we rewrote most of the functionality we used in C# over a couple of weekends.

When I make those comments, they are about the language, not the ecosystem or the product as a whole.

The language is merely ok.

The ecosystem, particularly with the amount of data feeds you can plug into it is pretty good as is the sheer enormity of the library of off-the-shelf functions it gives you.

Ok, your comment was not about what I thought it was (if I understand your response). It was really about how fast Mathematica is and not about the symbolic functional / lisp like / whatever of the language?

It's more about what people use it for and how they use it rather than capabilities. I was a little cranky and sarcastic initially and I don't think that came across clearly!

"It is compared to Fortran and floats somewhere between R and Octave."

I haven't heard a more amusingly wrong characterization of our language in a long, long time.

Sorry there was a little intentional derision in that comment.

My gripe is more that for the multitude of problem domains that you can represent in mathematica, a huge amount can be done off the shelf for the same effort with something a lot cheaper if not entirely free. Very few people need or use the capabilities past the very basics.

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