On 03/10/12 06:27 PM, William Stein wrote:
On Saturday, March 10, 2012, David Kirkby<david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote:
On 10 March 2012 13:53, rjf<fate...@gmail.com> wrote:
If you want a free open-source implementation of the language (without
most
of the mathematical commands)
you can use the one I wrote in Lisp. Mock MMA..
It is not a simple language. One does not often start with a complicated
language and add to it and make
it simpler.
RJF
To be fair, Stephen Wolfram did not say he was gong to add anything to
the Mathematica language to make it the easiest language to learn. He
could attempt such a mission with better documentation, better editor,
free programming courses etc.
But IMHO, Mathematica will never be the easiest language to learn.
I'm curious which useful computer languages you personally consider to be
"relatively easy" to learn, at least compared to Mathematica. You may
assume the learner is already proficient in some computer language.
I don't claim to know all of these languages well, but of those I've used, I
would rank them something like this.
HARDEST
Assembly language (mainly x86, but also a bit with DSP chips)
HARD
C++, Mathematica
MEDIUM
C, awk, PHP, MATLAB, Fortran
EASY
BASIC, Python, Pascal, LABVIEW, HPVee
That does not reflect how well I know them. I know Mathematica better than
Python, as I've spent more time learning it. I barely know Fortran.
Ruby is supposed to be very easy to learn, though personally I've never looked
at it.
I think "pure" is a very interesting language, though I've never tried learning
it.
You could argue to the cows come home about what is the world's easiest program
to learn, but I don't think Mathematica will ever be:
"definitively the world's easiest to learn language..."
which were the exact words used by Wolfram.
I think there's a BIG difference between knowing a language WELL, and being able
to cobble something together with it. Someone earlier claimed you could write
Mathematica like BASIC. But that would be a particularly stupid thing to do.
Dave
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