Lots of froth, lots of buzz, lots of hype. Few facts, few examples. It's actually hard to comment on, as there's so little to get hold of. Standard Wolfram fare, rally (still waiting for CAs to take over the world), but always disappointing from someone evidently so smart.<p>Oh, and if Mathematica is the basis of the "Wolfram language", and this is the universal computing language of our new "interconnected brain", I'm leaving for another universe. Unless the boy who cried wolf really has cornered one this time.
Bombastic, long winded and narcissistic. On target for Stephen Wolfram.<p>But, if you've used mathematica it is the closest thing we have right now to the star trek computer. In a single line I can get solutions to complex problems that would take days in Ruby, Lisp or Haskell. It is the same distance again as Lisp is from C.<p>In fact, many of the failures you see write-ups on HN I've been able to model and solve in a few minutes with MMA. In particular the rap genius Heroku queue issue.
Another good opportunity to re-post this critique of "A New Kind of Science" by Cosma Shalizi. It's not kind.<p><a href="http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/" rel="nofollow">http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfra...</a>
It'll be neat when Wolfram uses their (his?) almighty genius to utterly change the world of computing. It'll also be neat when they implement basic undo/redo functionality in Mathematica.
What my view is of what he is trying to explain:<p>You can do awesome stuff with their mathematical based tools. There are tools for statistics, conversions between units, calculation with dates & times, and a lot more. Look for yourself at <a href="http://www.wolframalpha.com/examples/" rel="nofollow">http://www.wolframalpha.com/examples/</a><p>Now, they also have the data. Like weather data, about media(movies/music), about languages, about media, about stock and also a lot more.<p>But for developers there is a problem, you can't build apps with their platform. For example you can't really store or receive data, and there are more practical problems.<p>So I think that they already solved the practical problems. Because they are developing software themselves this way. So for making it friendly for developers they only have to build some frontend for it.
And it's only going to be £3000 a seat!!!<p>Excuse the sarcasm but Mathematica is unjustifiably expensive to be general purpose and ubiquitous and I'm sure any derivative or superior tool will be as well.
If scientists can build computational models and test ideas in a significantly easier way, then this is definitely an important project.<p>Wolfram has a large following in the academic world and improvements to his product line can turn into real results.
>There are plenty of existing general-purpose computer languages. But their vision is very different—and in a sense much more modest—than the Wolfram Language.<p>Indeed.
Sounds very promising, Wolfram seems to be on the right track here, pricing might be an issue but I am looking forward to the "language" like the instant cloud deployment.
There is more happening with R, D3 / Javascript info vis, and the iPython/Notebook stack around data science than Wolfram as a singular corporation can possibly keep up with. In a recent version R was embraced and extended, is this another step with those same sorts of strategies?<p>The value of these Open Source communities go way beyond the core language and arise out of the structure.<p>This will go the way of Linux/BSD (only Microsoft could justify rolling forward alone with its own OS kernel).
I love hearing Wolfram give talks (I went to his Elements intro at the SF Maker's Fair, right after the iPad came out), and his blog posts; I get sucked in, thinking--- this genius, he thinks of everything!<p>Then I try to find the "Redo" button in Mathematica and I reconsider.
The main difference of the Mathematica language to Lisp was this:<p>a) the Mathematica language has an extensive user manual, but the specification of the language is missing.<p>b) Mathematica uses term rewriting. Lisp is based on an evaluation model, with procedural macros added.