[blergh123]

I'd really like an explanation of what's so amazing about this language. I saw the closing keynote today at Strangeloop and I can't understand why people are so excited. The language is proprietary and I don't feel like it's something I would actually use myself.

The impression I got was that this project is an inventor's dream, which he has obviously obsessed over for some time, and it is an impressive feat, it just comes across as self centered and I have trouble understanding who might use the language and why..

[mtrpcic]

A large part of what's impressive about the language isn't the language, it's that it's tied together so many different data sources from around the globe that it can generate information that would be a nightmare to do manually.

[th0ma5]

This still looks like a nightmare. No discoverability, no namespaces, no metadata management... these are all implemented in knowledge management systems, but this thing, whatever it is (not a language, not a knowledgebase, maybe a collection of pre-scripted demo applications?) has none of this.

[rtkwe]

The language itself is not the exciting bit really, it's the data and processing APIs that it integrates with. They're taking care of a lot of information gathering for your through that integration which is pretty neat.

[michael_fine]

From what I can tell, it seems like a quirky lisp with a great set of libraries, and a very integrated IDE. Is there more to it?

[taliesinb]

It also has knowledge about the world... So here for example we're training a image classifier to distinguish paintings by different artists:

https://www.wolframcloud.com/objects/051a4cda-5c0e-423b-8872...

I don't think there's another language you could use to do that in ~5 minutes.

[taliesinb]

Another example, to show off:

By running this code:

    CloudDeploy[
      FormFunction[
        "text" -> "String", 
        Classify["FacebookTopic", #text, "TopProbabilities"] &, 
        "JSON"
      ],
      Permissions -> "Public"
    ]

I get a web form that can be used to enter arbitrary text and have social media topic inferred on it:

https://www.wolframcloud.com/objects/0cda973b-8e12-43d7-a9d3...

Try something like "I just had the most amazing meal at Four Burgers today".

[pr_fancycorn]

That's about right. It's somewhat of a superset of most languages, with Lisp chosen as its programmatic subset of choice. And its libraries are huge. Something like a few thousand functions. And the IDE uses the same language, so you can programmatically construct UIs. The key in all of this is that everything uses the same data structure.

In previous versions the data stuff was not impressive, but with the recent versions it's starting to come into par with the rest of the language.