On 12 March 2012 01:57, Tom Boothby <tomas.boot...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Sun, Mar 11, 2012 at 12:01 PM, Dr. David Kirkby
>> 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? I believe it is a totally unrealistic goal. > 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. He has Wolfram|Alpha, and that takes natural language, but it has some serious problems. I'm sure he can improve it, but personally I'm convinced Mathematica will be the easyist language to learn. If you mean will it be the easist to get a result, then perhaps it might be. As I noted before, there's a big difference between learning a language properly, and being able to cobble something together that does what you want it to do. > Two years ago, few would believe that a computer could win Jeopardy, > much less against the best players in recent history. I'm not sure whta "Jeopardy" is in this context. I know nobody thought computers would beat humans at chess, but they beat the top grandmasters on a regular basis. But in some ways chess is much easier, as a computer knows the rules, and it bascially boils down to processing power. There is no ambiguity in the input. But human speak is not so precise. Anyway, we shall see in a couple of years time if Wolfram was right, but past experience tells me he exagerates. His book "NKS" was such an example. He is undoubty a bright guy, but has an ego the size of the moon. 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
