Comment by taliesinb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by taliesinb | Hacker News Reader

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You will soon be able to use any of the cloud products mentioned on http://www.wolframcloud.com/.

There will also be Wolfram Desktop, the local IDE for the Wolfram Language that comes with our online products, as well as Mathematica 10, a non-cloud-enabled instantiation of the language for the academic market.

If you want notification as soon as we go public, sign up on http://www.wolfram.com/programming-cloud/.

Disclosure: I deployed this code from my own copy of a prerelease version of Wolfram Desktop, which I could do because I'm an employee.

P.S. Your idea of being able to write Wolfram Language code straight into Alpha and have it execute is an interesting one. You can do some basic stuff like http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Table[i^2%2C+{i%2C+1%2C...] already, but I agree we should allow you to execute anything (safe) using Alpha.

> P.S. Your idea of being able to write Wolfram Language code straight into Alpha and have it execute is an interesting one.

It's really shocking to me that this idea might be new. To anyone. As an end user, the "input interpretation" box sends a very clear (but apparently wrong) message: "you entered a for-dummies query, which would have looked like [this] in advanced mode." I am pretty sure that every single time I've looked at a Wolfram Alpha result page, I've spent a significant amount of time searching in vain for the way to uncover that advanced mode. It is so absurdly obvious that it must be hidden in there somewhere, because otherwise, what purpose could showing me the raw Wolfram Language text possibly serve? It can only ever be run in an environment that I don't have access to! Alas, there apparently has been no purpose all this time.

I'm working on an open source knowledge engine thing roughly similar to WolframAlpha.

I'm pretty interested in the types of things you might like to do in your "advanced mode".

I've begun work on a SymPy part of it for the math parts, but one of the first things I realised was that it might make sense to expose the "knowledge base" itself to python.

> I'm pretty interested in the types of things you might like to do in your "advanced mode".

"Advanced mode" in this context simply means "I want to write an expression in a formal language because it lets me remove the difficult-to-control natural language parsing." It's actually a simpler mode, because it does less, but it requires the user to use a programming language, which is generally considered "advanced" on this type of user interface.

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