| A little bit, but fresh. Parroting some things too. Pros: (1) At surface it's mostly M-expressions variant, but underneath is term-rewriting system. This makes it, well, anything. Multi-paradigm is an understatement. Feels like a better layer of abstraction to float in than "code is data". (2) That TRS has possibly biggest rule set in existence. I doubt anyone but Stephen has good idea of the breadth of it, but it just works. (3) It's been around for 30 years (40, if you count SMP). Most notebooks from 30 years ago will run just fine on latest. This means it has good foundations. They're gonna add a LLVM compiler in there soon and so far they make it seem like just another day at the office. (4) Did I mention the giant rule set? It had function for anything that came up on my plate, well integrated with everything else, and well documented (color-coded!), runnable examples and all. (5) Notebooks and other facilities in the language/environment encourage exploration. I've barely begun working with it but I already used it thrice to solve some tricky problems. Porting that to whatever I use in production seemed trivial so far, once I groked it with a .nb first. (6) You can simply reach out to curated datasets, and they're really impressive. I feel like they covered beginner level pretty well, as well as a lot of specialist areas, but there are holes in the "middle". This doesn't sound like intractable problem and it's only getting better. Playing with their neural net repository is something I look forward too. (7) A lot of what would usually be boring boilerplate elsewhere (unit conversions, plotting parameters, etc.), here can be done via natural language input. (8) Makes math look nice and readable. Cons: (a) Some areas grow neglected at times (i.e. graphs atm). But that sounds natural - this is a tree or a forest, not a flower. (b) It looks usable for production as live system, but you better prepare budget. (c) It's not open-source. You'll be hard pressed to know what's exactly happening under your code. As I grow older, I care increasingly less. (d) You have to wait for updates for fixes/features. (e) I'm afraid that if you don't have at least some inclinations towards science (vs. "programming"), you're not going to enjoy it. This is not a tool to maximize CRUD app output. Remarks: (I) After watching some streams by Stephen, I feel it harder and harder to justify attacks on his ego. He sounds like a really smart and sensible guy with enthusiasm of a child and huge ideas that may or may not pan out. (II) "Computational" thing he's pushing for makes perfect sense to me. At even rudimentary level, I feel like end-game for math notation (or music, for that matter) isn't some prescriptions of Royal Society of Mathematical Notation, but exactly something like Wolfram Language is. And on high level, "mining computational universe" for actual practical stuff also makes sense. But we'll see. Feels right but far away. |