Re: Memory Blowup Issues
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg126914] Re: Memory Blowup Issues
- From: Richard Fateman <fateman at cs.berkeley.edu>
- Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2012 03:58:41 -0400 (EDT)
- Delivered-to: l-mathgroup@mail-archive0.wolfram.com
- References: <jrg2jv$sk4$1@smc.vnet.net>
On 6/15/2012 12:32 PM, Bill Rowe wrote: >> Quoting the last paragraph: > >> "It'll probably be related to my goal in the next year or two of >> making Mathematica definitively the world's easiest to learn >> language..." > > I can accept this is Wolfram's goal and applaud their efforts to > achieve it. However, I still think this is a goal unlikely to be achieved. Yes. > > It seems clear Wolfram has another goal as well for Mathematica > which is for users to be able to do any computation they can > think of in any field with Mathematica. To that end, the number > of available functions has grown significantly with every > release. Added functions generally increase learning difficulty > if for no other reason than there is more to learn. Not if the added functionality is all orthogonal to existing functionality. > > Also, if you look at Mathematica as a programming language and > compare it to other programing languages such as BASIC, C++ > etc., it seems clear a key distinction is the ability to do > advanced mathematics in Mathematica that cannot be done in other > languages without writing a significant amount of code. You are comparing it to the wrong languages if you want to compare languages by their ability to do (symbolic) computation. If you > don't have a background in mathematics, how could you take > advantage of this distinction? You would probably not take advantage of these features. If they are orthogonal to what you want to write a program about, who cares? > And if you aren't using the > mathematical tools Mathematica offers, why use it over something > like BASIC? Because Stephen Wolfram "invented" Mathematica and he did not invent BASIC? > Given the relative cost of a Mathematica license and > a BASIC interpreter/compiler, it seems rather silly to invest in > a Mathematica license and not use Mathematica's mathematics toolbox. You miss the point. Buying a Mathematica license contributes money to SW. > > Mathematica may well become the easiest to learn language *for > doing mathematics and advanced computation*. I doubt that it will become any easier than it is now. But, I don't see > Mathematica becoming the easiest to learn language for say > creating web sites, games and a great many other things that are > created using programing languages. One could write, in Mathematica, a package that includes selections from palettes and such, that could be used for constructing web sites, games, etc. Such a package could also be written in other languages too. Does WRI have the people who could design such a package that qualified as "easiest to use"? Is SW motivated to pay such people to produce such a product? Maintain it? The comparison would be with (say) Ruby, Python, PHP, and many older languages that have been made web-aware. RJF > >