Wolfram Language Introduction for Programmers | Hacker News Reader

Wolfram Language Introduction for Programmers

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92 pointsColinWright23 comments

Is there an outline somewhere of the differences between ordinary Mathematica syntax and "Wolfram Language"? I was a bit disappointed when I first discovered that it seemed so only resemble Mathematica, which is excellent for REPL style programming but pretty hopeless for large scale structured programming, much like Matlab.

I'm curious to know what you think makes Wolfram Language (which is the language used in the desktop program Mathematica) hopeless for large scale structured programming.

Mathematica, Cloud and Alpha are three examples of products that use this language (not exclusively but extensively). I would qualify these as large scale products.

I've been testing Cloud since April, and although I don't think the environment is ready for production yet, the problems are more related to the UI and the backend than to the actual language and libraries.

What's the point of showing that here? You have to pay through your nose for Mathematica or so to make any use of it.

If you have a Raspberry Pi, you can download it for free(-as-in-beer) and run it over X, albeit slowly.

You have to pay for a Mac to use Swift and nobody complained.

Point taken :-)

finally available for everyone: https://programming.wolframcloud.com/app/

Content hidden behind a login. Care to elaborate?

http://www.wolfram.com/programming-cloud

I think the relevant part is "Start coding and deploying now–for free." Whereas before you had to spend at least a few hundred dollars on Mathematica.

Opening up access to the wolfram language will let more science be possible using Mathematica and remain reproducible by non-Mathematica users. Must be a good thing.

Why is it a good thing to let more science be possible using Mathematica?

The issue with Mathematica for science isn't that it's expensive, it's that it's proprietary and secret.

Do you only work on projects that are 100% open source?

Because it better enables people to produce results. Those results can be verified outside of Mathematica.

After registration (no credit card) you gain access to wolfram programming cloud - free plan. You can also upgrade for more storage/computation time.

I'm so glad Wolfram is allowing me to write software for free now. What an amazing innovation.

Wolfram should patent it.

It's a new kind of programming.

After I login I either get an error page, or a dark grey blank page... Seems they're having issues.

I've tried with adblock/flashblock disabled.

Kind of confusing how they call anonymous functions "pure functions". Having function literals is great, but calling them pure functions is going to be frustrating for anyone coming from a background in FP.

This is the first time I've seen the symbolic manipulation explained. It's kind of like pattern-matching taken up to 11. Can anybody give some practical examples? For instance, the docs mention here that it's used in lieu of a types system.

Here's a couple elementary examples that are useful:

f[x_Integer]:=x^2

Basically the pattern for the argument of f must match the pattern _Integer, which means that the argument is an integer. If the pattern does not match, then it stays in an unevaluated form; you could have it throw an error by having an extra pattern f[_]:=Assert[False] or whatever.

f[x_] /; x>2 := x^2

Same, but in this case only if x>2.

Basic symbolic manipulation:

Sin[x^2 + x + 2] /. x->3

Evaluate at x=3.

θ^2/r /. {r -> Sqrt[x^2 + y^2], θ -> ArcTan[x, y]}

Convert from polar coordinates to Cartesian.

General programming:

In[21]:= Cases[{1,2,3,4}, x_ /; x>2 && PrimeQ[x] -> x^2] Out[21]= {9}

Kind of like a list comprehension.

What is the difference between Wolfram Desktop and Mathematica?

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