Instant Apps for the Apple Watch with the Wolfram Language | Hacker News Reader

Instant Apps for the Apple Watch with the Wolfram Language

blog.stephenwolfram.com

35 pointstrurl4217 comments

It's such a shame the licensing of Wolfram Mathematica is so strict and pricing is high. I get it, it's the fruit of a lot of hard work but sadly it won't get the traction it deserves.

The Wolfram Cloud sandbox

https://www.wolframcloud.com

and raspberry-pi

http://www.wolfram.com/raspberry-pi

editions are free. I understand - low power - but still one can at least try it out.

With a non-commercial license.

I had no idea the Wolfram Cloud had grown so useful. If you're here reading comments to see if the article is worth it: It shows how small snippets of code in the Wolfram Language get packaged as an "app" via a companion app on iPhone (which seems like a runtime essentially). That iPhone app also has an Apple Watch component to surface the packaged Wolfram Code app on the watch. Tons of quick examples of pretty clever things.

I bought the Home edition of Mathematica, and have always enjoyed using it. You can program in many paradigms, functional, rules-based, imperative, etc... The hooks to the data and the notebook interface, far before iPython, iJulia, Beaker and others came along, so it has a head start with integration, and as another wrote below, a great standard library.

Who uses the wolfram language? It seems pretty expressive and powerful... but I don't really see a strong case for adoption.

I've only ever seen or heard of it being used by Stephen Wolfram. It must be fun to have a huge engineering team to help support what is essentially a pet project.

Maybe they will someday release something with general availability and competitive pricing, but for now it seems to be behind a walled garden. But I wouldn't worry. If Wolfram Language truly exposes any novel concepts, then it is only a matter of time until the open source community implements those features for everyone else to use.

It's a shame, but I'm skeptical Wolfram will ever see the inherent value of getting real software into the world. From what I've seen, he would much rather build proprietary toys that only he can use, rather than building open-source tools that can be ubiquitous.

If Wolfram has cool toys and isn't willing to share, then so be it. The open source community can build our own cool toys.

The language part of the Wolfram Language is still really kludgy to use and quite slow. Even doing simple things like writing a function or an if statement is painful. What it does have going for it is the biggest, baddest standard library available.

imo, the language would be much more compelling if the syntax was redesigned from the ground up and made easier to debug (the error messages in Mathematica are next to useless)

I'm sorry but your comment will be grossly misleading to people unfamiliar with the language. There's absolutely nothing painful about If and Function. However, I must note that in a rule-based language both are used far more sparingly than they would be in an imperative, or even functional language. I found myself moving from If to Replace, for example.

Angelo Pesce (aka c0de517e) has written about using it as a rendering engineer on his blog[0]. I've heard of others using it in similar scenerios as well, but don't have a link to provide for them.

[0]: http://c0de517e.blogspot.com/2013/10/wolframs-mathematica-10... (among a couple other posts about using it for specific tasks. He also spends some time defending it on there as well)

I use the language and I enjoy it. As a physicist, I find a lot of value in (1) its ability to do math, (2) its powerful functional nature, and (3) its broad and well-documented standard library. To me, these advantages are well worth the $80 student price I paid years ago. I know that some of the community here dislikes the language for costing money, being closed source, and being marketed by Stephen Wolfram, but to me, it's worth it. I'm often impressed at how quickly I can accomplish complex data analysis tasks. I think the fact that the built-in libraries are consistent in their architecture/documentation adds a surprisingly large amount of value because it makes it easy to do new things quickly.

And of course, I find value in other languages too.

you're not the target market - every scientist and mathematician initially and recently home hobbyists. BTW once you leave uni, paying to be productive is the easiest decision you'll ever make - half arsed and free isn't all it's cracked up to be.

How does this get around the App Store Review Guidelines?

    2.7: Apps that download code in any way or form will be rejected
    2.8: Apps that install or launch other executable code will be rejected

This is just a guess, but it looks like it could be running in a WebView:

> although the apps were designed for the Apple Watch, you can actually also use them on the web, or on a phone

I would love to see some of these on the pebble time or android wear as well

It is on pebble

http://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/406359

Looks like everything runs on Wolfram's servers, the phone basically just downloads an image (which is then displayed on the watch). In that sense calling what you'd write/deploy an "app" is a little misleading in a mobile device context...

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