Wolfram Breakthrough Knowledge-based Programming Language – what it means for Data Science?
The coming Wolfram Programming language, 30 years in making, will probably be the largest, most comprehensive, and most knowledge-based programming language ever, and can be a significant advance for data science.
Ajay Ohri, March 2, 2014.
About a week ago, Stephen Wolfram, chief designer of Mathematica and of Wolfram Alpha announced that he would be releasing the Wolfram Language to the world and showed a demo video for it. The language was first referenced by him in November 2013 with some follow up examples of code.
The language claims to have been developed over the past 25 years and apparently the impetus to release it is to further increase the knowledge revolution by knowledge programming by sharing a breakthrough in it.
Since the language is still in alpha -phase and is going to be released only on Raspberry Pi, it may be some time when we do a comprehensive code review on it with tests and benchmarks.
This is how the Wolfram Language claims to work by eliminating the distinction between data and programming . It is symbolic language and quite possibly the most extensive. The aim is break down the input text into a sequence of tokens, check for the Operators ( which ultimately what determine the structure of the expression), evaluate them based on a precedence, and then apply functions.
The documentation is extensive and shortly there will be a programming playground in the cloud as per the earlier blog post.
Big promises apart - the current language of data scientists remains Python and R, and it would be interesting to see if the knowledge programming thing that the Wolfram Language enhances the availability of knowledge programming or simply fades as a marketing fad with some of it's innovations copied by competitors.
About a week ago, Stephen Wolfram, chief designer of Mathematica and of Wolfram Alpha announced that he would be releasing the Wolfram Language to the world and showed a demo video for it. The language was first referenced by him in November 2013 with some follow up examples of code.
The language claims to have been developed over the past 25 years and apparently the impetus to release it is to further increase the knowledge revolution by knowledge programming by sharing a breakthrough in it.
Since the language is still in alpha -phase and is going to be released only on Raspberry Pi, it may be some time when we do a comprehensive code review on it with tests and benchmarks.
This is how the Wolfram Language claims to work by eliminating the distinction between data and programming . It is symbolic language and quite possibly the most extensive. The aim is break down the input text into a sequence of tokens, check for the Operators ( which ultimately what determine the structure of the expression), evaluate them based on a precedence, and then apply functions.
The documentation is extensive and shortly there will be a programming playground in the cloud as per the earlier blog post.
Big promises apart - the current language of data scientists remains Python and R, and it would be interesting to see if the knowledge programming thing that the Wolfram Language enhances the availability of knowledge programming or simply fades as a marketing fad with some of it's innovations copied by competitors.
