On Sun, Mar 11, 2012 at 12:01 PM, Dr. David Kirkby <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote: > On 03/11/12 05:00 PM, Volker Braun wrote: >> >> On Saturday, March 10, 2012 3:59:24 PM UTC-5, Dr. David Kirkby wrote: >>> >>> >>> HARD >>> C++, Mathematica >>> >> The Mathematica language is just difficult because its ugly and uses weird >> operators (hello /. operator). But in terms of difficulty its a far cry >> from C++ which is really three totally different Turing-complete languages >> (preprocessor, C++, templates) in one with funky interactions between >> them. >> Its definitely easier to become proficient with Mathematica than C++. Of >> course C++ will teach you much more about programming than Mathematica. > > > I'm personally not going to get drawn into arguments about what languages > are harder and for what reasons. Perhaps I should not have even answered > William's question, or posted that list. > > But I still maintain that Stephen Wolfram will never definitively make > Mathematica the world's easiest to learn language. > > I take exception to what he said: > > "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..."
The man's got a respectable goal. What's to take exception to? The goal may be unobtainable within our current view of what Mathematica is, but if you read the rest of the reddit discussion, he really seems to be pushing hard on the "alpha" paradigm, and natural language interaction. Two years ago, few would believe that a computer could win Jeopardy, much less against the best players in recent history. From what I hear, Siri is fairly awesome. Natural language interaction is coming. If Wolfram's goal is to make Mathematica operate via a natural language interface, it could be viewed as the "easiest language to learn". Will its performance compete with hand-written C? Not for a while. Will its usability? Time will tell. The end goal, from a usability standpoint, is likely a "do what I mean" spoken language interface. "Compute the Davenport constant for all abelian groups of order less than 20". In another part of the discussion, Wolfram mentions an interest in automatic algorithm discovery. Imagine a system which understands English and math well enough to solve such problems with automatically-discovered algorithms. I doubt an army of 1 million Wolframs could implement such a thing in 2 years. But, these are awesome goals. Don't hate the man for dreaming. > > > dave > > > -- > To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com > To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to > sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel > URL: http://www.sagemath.org -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
