[bru]

Some notes:

- parallel and concurrent are 2 different things

- the 'symbolic languages' definition seems off. Wikipedia puts it right:

> symbolic programming is computer programming in which the program can manipulate formulas and program components as data

So it's not "using graphs & such to program"

[tokipin]

Take this[1] for example. That's a regular Mathematica notebook. You can insert images (like drag & drop them from your desktop) directly into notebooks. It's actually very convenient for image processing. The same thing holds true for things like the graphical output of plotting functions, which retain their underlying vector data.

The symbolic paradigm isn't necessary for this, but it makes it easier. Implementation-wise these things requires less "special case-ing" than you would think because the symbolic paradigm in essence encourages your representations to be naked. Thus images, plots, etc are not "black box" items. They're structured data represented in the same language, but which the frontend happens to display in visual forms.

(Code itself is also data, except that if a symbol in the data has an associated transformation rule, that transformation rule is applied. This mechanism is how you make data do 'variables' and 'functions'. These variables and functions work more or less the same as they would in a common programming language, but the underlying mechanism is nothing but data transformations.)

[1] http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/ref/EdgeDetect.html

[seanmcdirmid]

Mathematica is a good example of a symbolic language (can't get more symbolic than term rewriting), but he calls that....knowledge oriented or some other nonsense.

[Orangeair]

Mathematica[0] and The Wolfram Language[1] are two different things. The Wolfram Language is a sort of extension of their Wolfram Alpha service, which Wolfram itself describes as "Knowledge Based." Mathematica is still just Mathematica.

[0]http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/

[1]https://www.wolfram.com/language/

[taliesinb]

No.

Mathematica is a commercial piece of desktop software that uses the Wolfram Language. Just like how RStudio uses R.

There are other product platforms (coming soon) that employ the Wolfram Language, both in cloud and desktop incarnations: http://www.wolframcloud.com/

[seanmcdirmid]

I'm not great at following markitecture, but didn't Mathematica exist and have a language before this language was rebraded as the Wolfram Language? There is nothing really wrong with this, but its understandable that people might be confused about it right now.

[taliesinb]

That's right, and what seems to be confusing people is that the language underlying Mathematica-the-product was always, implicitly, "Mathematica".

We were a one-product company, and it didn't make sense to distinguish Mathematica-the-product and the language it ran.

The last time we'd tried to branch the underlying language off into its own thing was in the early nineties, where a certain intern by the name of Brin was in the middle of refactoring the code before he went off to do other things :).

My prediction is that the confusion will pass soon once we have these concrete products actually out in the world.

A new generation of people will be using and seeing the language for the first time. And they'll be doing stuff that old-school Mathematica-the-product (and most of its user base) would find quite alien.

Things like trying code out in online sandboxes, coding things in the cloud IDE (or locally, via Eclipse or "Wolfram Desktop"), deploying public APIs for other people to use, building websites totally within the language, doing internet-of-things type stuff, embedding chunks of WL code in Java or Python or whatever, writing natural language parsers on top of Alpha's technology, creating data science workflows, making private clouds, designing interactive visualizations, tweeting code at our executor-bot... and on and on...

[ExpiredLink]

@see http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/22nhb2/six_prog...

for some valid critique.

[vkjv]

If you want concurrent by default, try an HDL. :)

[noobiemcfoob]

I had the same thought. I find it odd he didn't mention them.

[coldtea]

>parallel and concurrent are 2 different things

That should be an implementation detail as far as the programmer is concerned. And languages should strive for parallelism anyway, not merely concurrency.

[tel]

The idea that parallel code is executed through a concurrency mechanism should be hidden, but it doesn't mean that the distinction between the two should be.

http://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/03/17/parallelism-... http://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2014/04/09/parallelism-...

[brikis98]

Thanks for the feedback. I updated the post with notes that mention these corrections.