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NFT: Curious about the new Wolfram programming language...

Dan in the Springs : 4/22/2014 10:33 pm
seeking opinions from programmers out there - lots of hype from Mr. Wolfram himself about how his new language is completely revolutionary. Interesting how he emphasizes repeatedly the symbolic nature of the language.

Anyone with an opinion on this yet?
Watch his announcement on the language... - ( New Window )
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simgiant : 4/22/2014 11:34 pm : link
Tough to have an opinion until we really know what it can do.
But if some of the bold claims he makes are true it could be very interesting. He has been working on it for 20 years...
Yeah, that's where I'm at...  
Dan in the Springs : 4/22/2014 11:38 pm : link
tried to play around with it but they just had me sign up for a waiting list.

I teach math and have a bunch of kids interested in learning to code - have been showing them the little bits of stuff I'm familiar with, mostly Java. This looks quite interesting though, and I'm wondering if it's really the future of coding.
I've seen it in use  
jcn56 : 4/23/2014 8:24 am : link
One of my projects is a collaboration with a university that has been working with Wolfram to utilize the programming language to do community/link analysis for analyzing security events.

To me, based on my limited exposure to it - it seems like a promising extension of what exists in Mathematica, and would be very useful in web enabling analytic-based applications (many of which today function almost entirely in applications that are glorified Excel front ends and graphical back ends).

As a fully-fledged programming language, I'm pessimistic. It's all well and good to say you've invented a new paradigm, but you've got to provide the constructs necessary to replace existing programming languages. From what I've seen (and again, very limited - could be wrong), exception handling isn't the greatest. Memory management, garbage collection, became an issue (although we were working with a beta and some extremely large data sets).

Put me in the cautiously optimistic that it'll be a good niche language, but not something useful in general application development.
Thanks jcn56...  
Dan in the Springs : 4/23/2014 8:27 am : link
appreciate the feedback.
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