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by taliesinb
4379 days ago
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Entity is part of the documented language -- we've standardized the representation of millions of real-world things. Looking up properties of Entities and parsing text into Entities depends on Wolfram|Alpha, just like the ServiceExecute function relies on Twitter and Facebook to work, and just like Graphics relies on a front-end executable to actually render. These aren't libraries as you might call (say) core.logic in Clojure, because Entity and co integrate tightly across the rest of the language, and because they all share the same System namespace. They aren't quite DSLs either, because if they were the entire language would be a DSL -- rather the language is symbolic, which gives it some properties in common with DSLs. If there is nomenclature that is different or new, it is mostly because the language is different. The only thing I can't defend is the pure in our "pure functions". They're not pure functions, they are lambdas. |
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Looking through examples, it still appears very much that domain specific calls were added to the very flexible language typically used in Mathematica to essentially extend computation to these new domains using domain specific widgets. (Also, some exchange data types.)
I'm still having trouble seeing how this is a radical departure from say, embedding a bunch of domain specific tie ins in a Lisp using macros (or similar constructs) to get a similar syntax across them.
I get that the constructs are likely tightly integrated, but I guess I'm still not seeing where it's more than a framework for dealing with particular classes of data running on top of a programming language that targets a hosted run time with a database of facts.
I'm not saying that this isn't a useful thing, and entirely worth it for well curated data. As I mentioned, I pay for essentially that service targeting a database about social media. I'm just trying to see if there's something key to understanding the features that I'm missing.
If you'll excuse one quasi-dig: it can sometimes be hard to see what something really is and what its use cases are through the hype and marketing.