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posted by Fnord666 on Monday April 08 2019, @06:32AM   Printer-friendly
from the a-slice-of-pi dept.

Submitted via IRC for fyngyrz

10 projects to try on your Raspberry Pi using this unusual programming language

Coding club body CoderDojo has put together a guide to projects you can try out using the Wolfram Language.

If you recently bought a Raspberry Pi and are wondering what to do with it, the Raspberry Pi Foundation and CoderDojo have published 10 projects you can try using the Wolfram Language.

The Wolfram Language is different from your typical programming language, in that has a large number of built-in functions for carrying out high-level tasks, such as looking up stock prices or classifying images for facial recognition.

Language creator Stephen Wolfram has explained what he considers sets the language apart.

"It's a new kind of thing. It's what I call a knowledge-based language, it's a language where a vast amount of knowledge about how to do computations and about the world is built right into the language," he said.

"So, right within the language there are primitives for processing images or laying out networks or looking up stock prices or creating interfaces or solving optimization problems."

This broad sweep of built-in capabilities gives the language abilities that aren't found in most other languages out of the gate, for example, typing currentImage[] captures the current image from the computer's camera.

As such, the language is suited to tasks such as retrieving and working with a wide range of data, everything from written language to geographic information, as well as visualizing that data using relatively few lines of code.


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  • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday April 08 2019, @06:59PM (1 child)

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Monday April 08 2019, @06:59PM (#826325) Journal

    Just what I was thinking! Now, I did appreciate A New Kind of Science on another level, as more confirmation of the importance of Computer Science. Maybe grade school education should have "'Rogramming" added to the 3 R's, that's just how important and foundation Computer Science may be. But yes, Wolfram seems to think he discovered all that first, when the pioneers of CS beat him to a lot of it by at least half a century. Conway came up with the Game of Life in 1970, and that sparked a lot of interest in cellular automata, but even then the concept had been around for about 3 decades.

    However, before charging ahead with the teaching of programming in grade school, we need better programming languages. Why is it that the famous algorithm textbook by CLR uses pseudo-code, instead of a real programming language? Still too much boilerplate, verbiage, and extraneous crap in real languages. Wolfram's new language sounds very much like a repeat of the whole "4th generation" language fad of the 1980s which basically degenerated into libraries of overly specific functions that lacked flexibility.

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  • (Score: 1) by anubi on Monday April 08 2019, @10:01PM

    by anubi (2828) on Monday April 08 2019, @10:01PM (#826391) Journal

    Maybe 4 R's now...

    Well, I think R is a useful language that personally, I think any STEM students should be introduced to early in their studies.

    --
    "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]