> Until things become more transparent, the handful of backend engineers willing to write in a functional style will keep using OCaml or Erlang.
Hey Keshav!
I think it's a more complicated story than that. Our ambition is larger than converting existing functional language programmers -- a lot of whom are happy (and passionate) about their current tools.
I think it is a much wider stratum of smart people who want to do things that were hitherto impossible (or impractical) without a vast amount of built-in knowledge and algorithms. And their potential will be unlocked by the "curated computing experience" that we provide.
Personally, I want everyone to be able to do the kinds of cool things that I regularly do on weekend projects, and that I know cannot be achieved in anything other than Wolfram Language.
And frankly, it'll be good for all of us to have an influx of new people with new ideas from different backgrounds who want to build and compute new and different kinds of things. Our tribe is still quite homogenous.
Although I suspect that at first it will be threatening to those of us who derive our pride (and job security) from being masters of somewhat arcane tools, processes, and knowledge.
What do you say to people like Guy Steele who believe that small languages that can be grown by their users are the way forward, and do not want to pay to use a closed source programming language, ever?
Thanks for the talk, I'll watch it tomorrow (gotta catch Snowden's interview at 10am).
But in the meantime, I'd say: pick your battles.
Many developers, including me, moved from Linux to OS X so they could get on with their lives.
And we pay for things much lower on the abstraction hierarchy: CPUs and GPUs and their proprietary IP, physical hardware, various industry-group protocols and standards, OSes in some cases, hosting.
And we know from experience that the whole hierarchy tends to move down as we build on it -- maybe the time has come for that to happen to languages, too.
If, in time, the things that WL is doing inspire higher-level, free languages to raise the abstraction (and semantic) bar, I think we'll all benefit. For now, we can only do what we do because we're a private company.
Hey Keshav!
I think it's a more complicated story than that. Our ambition is larger than converting existing functional language programmers -- a lot of whom are happy (and passionate) about their current tools.
I think it is a much wider stratum of smart people who want to do things that were hitherto impossible (or impractical) without a vast amount of built-in knowledge and algorithms. And their potential will be unlocked by the "curated computing experience" that we provide.
Personally, I want everyone to be able to do the kinds of cool things that I regularly do on weekend projects, and that I know cannot be achieved in anything other than Wolfram Language.
And frankly, it'll be good for all of us to have an influx of new people with new ideas from different backgrounds who want to build and compute new and different kinds of things. Our tribe is still quite homogenous.
Although I suspect that at first it will be threatening to those of us who derive our pride (and job security) from being masters of somewhat arcane tools, processes, and knowledge.