Re:Wolfram Language
by discreteevent on Friday November 22, 2013 @06:46PM
(#6784505)
Similar experience here. I didn't do CS in college but used MMA a fair bit. Then ended up programming for a living in mainstream 90s languages. So when FP started to make a comeback recently it just hit me that "Hey this is just like Mathematica". But even then the Mathematica environment was better in ways than what you get with some FP languages now. I don't get all the retro fetish. I know my vi but I've no wish to use it over a good IDE. Hopefully Light table can do it for a functional language.
Now I know that none of those things were invented by Wolfram (the company or the man), but they were put into productive use, in a very slick and beautiful application with a slew of symbolic and numerical math libraries which were world class.
I guess to a large extent, you're not missing something, but the libraries are comprehensive, well designed, well documented, very consistent and reasonably intuitive.