Stephen Wolfram: Something Very Big Is Coming

http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2013/11/13/something-very-big-is-coming-our-most-important-technology-project-yet/

by rawfael • 13 years ago

39 27 13 years ago

blog.wolframalpha.com

th0ma5• 13 years ago

Sounds to me a little like the Semantic Web and something like Heroku together as a cohesive system. Sounds okay!

nfoz• 13 years ago

Oh yeah? Is it a new Segway?

throwaway19792• 13 years ago

That was the biggest "product release" disappointment I've had in my life. I was a naive kid ... huge fan of Kamen (actually, I still am a big fan of the man). IT was going to change everything!!! Bezos and a bunch of other big wigs are investing in it!!! I grew up a bit after that ...

happycube2• 13 years ago

If only they had followed Amazon's business model (screw the margins, and scale up as fast as possible) it might actually have taken off...

Anon842• 13 years ago

A New New Kind of Science?

bsdetector• 13 years ago

Sounds like an amped up Wolfram Alpha so more like...

A New Science Of Kinds.

Anon842• 13 years ago

Maybe Wolfram Alpha will receive a bunch of bug fixes and finally move up to Beta version?

</joke>

headgasket• 13 years ago

One thing is for sure; clouds are gathering.

happycube2• 13 years ago

Winter is coming.

(... at least in the Northern Hemisphere)

mprat• 13 years ago

Is the language Mathematica and Wolfram | Alpha now use not called the Wolfram Language?

quchen• 13 years ago

The Mathematica language is usually simply referred to as "Mathematica", at least from what I can tell from my experience on mathematica.stackoverflow.com. Probably because the only frontend that allows doing actual work is the Mathematica software (excluding development of own modules).

nickmain• 13 years ago

Existing discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6726070

james33• 13 years ago

If you don't have time to read all of the way through, the "coming soon" portion is ready to take your e-mail at http://www.wolframcloud.com.

rohitv• 13 years ago

So is Wolfram Language: http://www.wolfram.com/wolfram-language/

mck-• 13 years ago

In most languages there’s a sharp distinction between programs, and data, and the output of programs. Not so in the Wolfram Language. It’s all completely fluid. Data becomes algorithmic. Algorithms become data. There’s no distinction needed between code and data. And everything becomes both intrinsically scriptable, and intrinsically interactive. And there’s both a new level of interoperability, and a new level of modularity.

Sounds like Lisp :p

taliesinb• 13 years ago

It's a little beyond that, in some ways. In the LISPs, you can view programs as data, but macros are different from, say, 'if'. The Read and Evaluate parts of the REPL are distinct phases.

Whereas in Wolfram Language, If is just an ordinary symbol that has attribute HoldRest to ensure that it can prevent evaluation of its two clauses until it knows which one to evaluate.

In other words, code is just data (expression) that happens to have specific rules that will cause it to evaluate in some way, yielding a new expression (which could be more code, or partially evaluated code, or data, or whatever).

But you can also have rules attached to several symbols together. So for example, when you see a Foo containing a Bar, replace it with a Baz:

   Foo[___, Bar, ___] := Baz;

It's a little like multiple dispatch, but it is slightly more general than even that. And totally pattern based (the pattern language is ridiculously rich).

There's one more twist, which is that everything is not just serializable, but in some sense it is its serialization (called FullForm). It's hard to explain what this means without playing around with stuff.

Also, the language has actual m-expressions, thank god, unlike most LISPs.

scardine• 13 years ago

I may loose some karma here, but I could not decide if the post is pure genius or something written during the maniac phase of a bipolar disorder.

lhnz• 13 years ago

Often there's no difference.

Zarathust• 13 years ago

I remember wolfram alpha being marketed pre-release as something that would make Google obsolete. The only reason I ever use this is for math when I do not have access to a native alternative such as matlab. Considering that I use less math than I used to, I wonder why it is still relevant.

mVChr• 13 years ago

Does "embeddable programs everywhere" [paraphrase] sound like a maintenance nightmare to anyone else?

Vektorweg• 13 years ago

Prolog 2.0 , big database included!

bfwork• 13 years ago

Mathematica finally gets undo?

tmikaeld• 13 years ago

It sounds VERY locked to the Wolfram cloud platform and NOT very open sourced… Just makes me think about Oracle type of lock-ins immediately :P

agos• 13 years ago

Reminds me of Brett Victor's “The future of programming” (http://vimeo.com/71278954), “Learnable Programming” (http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/) and “Inventing on principle” (http://vimeo.com/36579366)

kineticfocus• 13 years ago

Reminds me of Wolfram's earlier book... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Kind_of_Science

Stephen Wolfram: Something Very Big Is Coming

Related Stories