Expanding the frontiers of computational thinking with Wolfram Language
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Expanding the frontiers of computational thinking with Wolfram Language
Stephen Wolfram has been working on computing language paradigms for nearly thirty years. His products are well known in scientific and engineering circles. The company’s Mathematica was first released in 1988, and in its latest incarnation is a very powerful computational engine, now based on the Wolfram Language. Last month at a South by Southwest keynote, he gave a long demo highlighting the many things you can do with the Wolfram language. Wolfram now aims to bridge the power of its computation engine to the vast stores of data that exist on the Internet.
Think of this idea as a very powerful general purpose API that can harness a trove of information on the Internet, and use it in very creative ways. Unlike other Web APIs, it doesn’t require you to learn REST or JSON and JavaScript or C#. Instead, it is a very English-like function based language, designed for relatively normal people who may not know much about coding.
Wolfram’s Alpha was introduced in 2009. The company calls it a “computational knowledge engine”, and it uses Mathematica’s computational power and Internet data sources to find answers to a wide variety of questions. Alpha is the power behind certain queries you can ask of Apple’s Siri, Samsung’s S Voice, and Microsoft’s Bing. The data sources are curated from structured data in both public and commercial websites, such as the CIA World Factbook , Wikipedia, and Dow Jones.
Wolfram language is a refinement and evolution of the functionality built into Mathematica and Alpha. Essentially Wolfram language is a rationalization and simplification of much of the underlying functionality in these products, “making the world’s knowledge computable,” as they pitch it. It is relatively unstructured, in the sense that you can use a function and some simple parameters and generate some very detailed results the likes of which would take a significant amount of programming on other platforms.
Source : Extremetech
