I just asked a few Wolfram employees at SXSW what this is. They said, "It's Mathematica running on our servers with better data store and NLP integration."<p>I also told them that the community seems confused about the product and that this page seemed to be mostly marketing bullshit. For some reason that made them really defensive, and they explained "It's pretty clear from the page what we're offering and the people we're trying to reach will see the value."<p>FYI to those wondering.
This may be worth it for the transition from lab project to app prototype but I would be seriously wary of deploying anything significant on a proprietary cloud in a proprietary language. Does anyone remember when Google App Engine hiked their prices? A lot of people had to switch off the platform because the traffic patterns of their apps did not work with the new pricing. That could very easily happen here and you'd have to port to a different language, not just a different runtime.<p>In my senior year of college we built some computer vision stuff in matlab (pretty similar) that we ported to C++ to put in an iOS app. It would have been cool to get a quick prototype by exposing some of the functions as web services but there's no way I would release on the app store with that setup.
There's no way a proprietary environment can be the future of programming, but Wolfram does have the right ideas.<p>Ctrl-F for "symbolic" in that page returns 14 results. The way I interpret it, they're aiming (rightly) to dismount programming from its local maxima in expressivity that is plaintext--a feat that Lisp and Smalltalk and a horde of gimmicky visual languages* couldn't do. Wolfram Language won't succeed here, but they'll get closer than anyone else has.<p>* Not saying that visual languages are inherently gimmicky; just that when you do write one, it's extremely tempting to fall into toyland.
For API building this is a much needed paradigm shift to functional programming. I met some backend engineers who built the backend of an very large and complex system with OCaml, and they never wrote a single unit test because they didn't really have to. Although humans are wired to think procedurally, a pure functional style can eliminate many of the holes that are easy to miss in a procedural program.<p>The only problem I see is that Mathemati... I mean, the Wolfram Language, is not open source. This means that there could be some application-level bug in the service running your API, and no community to quickly identify and patch those bugs. Until things become more transparent, the handful of backend engineers willing to write in a functional style will keep using OCaml or Erlang.
For some background on the language, check out Stephen Wolfram's intro video: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_P9HqHVPeik" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_P9HqHVPeik</a><p>The demos are all pretty impressive, and putting aside the breathless marketing of the programming cloud page, this looks awesome.
As a long time Mathematica (MMA) user I can say I am confused and bemused as to where Wolfram is heading. They have their fingers in so many pies its hard to work out whats going on.<p>Recent Wolfram marketing on MMA/Wolfram language seem to be aimed at consumer, Facebook and Hedgefund users rather than their traditional base in the Sciences and Engineering.<p>There are plenty of pretty short examples, but the MMA kernel grinds to a halt when pushing into larger problem sets. The CUDA and Parallel processor commands are limited and haven't really been updated in the last few years (pushing you back to other tools).<p>Developing on Workbench is anything but a joy and without even considering speed one is better off developing on a regular programming IDE for programs requiring multiple libraries. The notebook interface just doesn't handle large programs well.<p>While functional programming is wonderful for some things, it is incredibly hard to debug with the current tools and effectively provides a level of self obfuscation when used exclusively.<p>The Computable Document Format (CDF) is a nice idea but the licensing terms are too restrictive for any commercial work. At present CDF also has a pretty slow, buggy interpreter.<p>All that said MMA is a great tool for early prototyping and a wide range of analysis, you just need to consider switching to something else if you get over several pages of code or utilize more than a few of your own libraries.<p>Like others have said, there are lots of tools out there and a combination of them will still be needed to produce the best outcome after the release of MMA10 and the Wolfram Cloud.
For me the real achievement of Wolfram is the visualization capabilities. The knowledge bases are nice if you happen to be interested in a domain that is represented, and they make for great (controlled) demonstrations, but Wolfram Alpha (which taps these same knowledge bases) really fails often when making arbitrary but reasonable queries.<p>I think Wolframs visualization libs set a high bar, though, and I hope non-closed communities (like the python scientific/mathematic programming community, the R community, etc) will rally to meet the challenge.
I think that Mathematica is innovative and love Mathematica. What I object to is that pretty much everything I've seen in the ads is touted as "revolutionary" when, in fact, it pretty much seems like a small upgrade to Mathematica as we know it today. One of the breathless accolades I read touted the "new" way you could type a one liner and have a video of an outline from your cam. Very nice, but I went to my old version of Mathematica, typed in the exact same thing with the exact same results. So while it's cool that Mathematica/Wolfram Language can do this, at this point in time it's hard to see where the new, circa 2014 revolution is coming about.
Here's a writeup by David Auerbach on the Wolfram Programming Language:
<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/03/stephen_wolfram_s_new_programming_language_can_he_make_the_world_computable.single.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/03/ste...</a>