Rich kids are into COBOL

Mouse mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG
Fri Mar 6 08:40:38 CST 2015


>>> one other, which you may or may not classify as a ¿language¿, is
>>> Mathematica.
>> I don't know enough about it to offer an opinion [...]
> I've been using Mathematica for years.  [...]  I've also used MatLab
> which also falls somewhat into that category.  MatLab is is really
> optimized around vectors and arrays.

That might be more similar to APL, then.

This has been rattling around in my mind for a little while now and I
think one reason I didn't think of things like Mathematica or Matlab is
that they're single-implementation.  Most of the things normally
thought of as programming languages are more or less independent of
their implementations, with multiple independent implementations.
Things like Mathematica, while they certainly can be seen as languages,
have only one implementation, often have an imprecise (or no!) spec
beyond "what the implementation does", and sometimes even come from
vendors who think they own the language somehow, throwing around
lawyers if anyone else tries to create an independent implementation.
(I don't know which, if either, of those applies to Mathematica
specifically, but I _have_ seen examples of each.)  This makes them
less useful; for example, even if I were willing to run someone else's
binary, I doubt Mathematica exists for NetBSD/sparc 1.4T.

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