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?
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?
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.
It's an Open Source Python-based platform for mathematical and science development. The IPython shell is developed coincident to the platform, and is a great shell in and of itself (useful even if you aren't using SciPy, NumPy, or matplotlib). I don't know much about Mathematica or MatLab, as I don't actually do much scientific work...but I know that when I was working with the SciPy folks, there were a lot of converts coming from those platforms and ecstatic about the benefits of Python for this kind of work.
1. http://blog.wolfram.com/2007/05/computable_data_functions.html0
2. http://www.wolfram.com/products/mathematica/analysis/content/ProgrammingLanguages.html