
Has anyone used mathematica as a programming language/environment? - ph0rque

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ph0rque
After reading this article [1], I did a bit of looking around on the internet,
and found out that Mathematica can be and is used as a programming
language/environment [2]. Have any of the news.YC readers used Mathematica as
a development environment? What are your impressions?

1\. <http://blog.wolfram.com/2007/05/computable_data_functions.html0>

2\.
<http://www.wolfram.com/products/mathematica/analysis/content/ProgrammingLanguages.html>

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npk
I have not used Mathematica as a programming environment. But I've written
three long numerical codes for mathematica. One was a ray-tracer for optical
design, the second was a stellar model, the most recent code is a monte-carlo
type simulator

So, mathematica is a beautiful language. It has symbols and pattern matching,
so you can think more "mathematically." Loops exist too, and now aren't that
slow, so you can think more like a computer. If you write mathematical code,
the code you write is rendered in mathematical type, this is an _amazing_
feature, and I'm glad Fortress is going to include it.

Pros aside, I've found mathematica hard to debug. The fact that the
interpreter costs money is also a big minus. What are you thinking about
writing in Mathematica?

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ph0rque
Nothing (yet :-) ). I took a solid-state physics course in undergrad; the
course was unoficially labeled "the mathematica course". We derived a 3D model
of an H atom using Heisenberg's equations. So when I recently saw mathematica
in the news, I checked out their website and saw that they seem to be heading
in the "general programming" direction. That made me curious about what people
are using it for.

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bluishgreen
Shall we start a matlab vs mathematica comment (troll) thread :) here please.

