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Comment by michael_fine | Hacker News Reader

From what I can tell, it seems like a quirky lisp with a great set of libraries, and a very integrated IDE. Is there more to it?

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It also has knowledge about the world... So here for example we're training a image classifier to distinguish paintings by different artists:

https://www.wolframcloud.com/objects/051a4cda-5c0e-423b-8872...

I don't think there's another language you could use to do that in ~5 minutes.

Another example, to show off:

By running this code:

    CloudDeploy[
      FormFunction[
        "text" -> "String", 
        Classify["FacebookTopic", #text, "TopProbabilities"] &, 
        "JSON"
      ],
      Permissions -> "Public"
    ]

I get a web form that can be used to enter arbitrary text and have social media topic inferred on it:

https://www.wolframcloud.com/objects/0cda973b-8e12-43d7-a9d3...

Try something like "I just had the most amazing meal at Four Burgers today".

That's about right. It's somewhat of a superset of most languages, with Lisp chosen as its programmatic subset of choice. And its libraries are huge. Something like a few thousand functions. And the IDE uses the same language, so you can programmatically construct UIs. The key in all of this is that everything uses the same data structure.

In previous versions the data stuff was not impressive, but with the recent versions it's starting to come into par with the rest of the language.

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