The Wolfram Language and Mathematica on Raspberry Pi, for free article tells that The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced a partnership with Wolfram Research to bundle a free copy of Mathematica and the Wolfram Language into future Raspbian images. Future Raspbian images will ship with the Wolfram Language and Mathematica by default; existing users can install them today. Raspberry Pi is only the second computer ever on which Mathematica has been bundled for free use.
Stephen Wolfram has a long posting on the topic titled Putting the Wolfram Language (and Mathematica) on Every Raspberry Pi. It tells that they are also releasing alongside the Raspberry Pi bundle a Remote Development Kit, that allows one to develop code and maintain a notebook interface on a standard computer, while seamlessly executing code on a networked remote Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi is just the first pilot for the Wolfram Language. The aim is that with those new tools the aim is to create a new path for learning programming—and connecting it to the real world—that a great many people are going to be able to benefit from.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
Sentient code: An inside look at Stephen Wolfram’s utterly new, insanely ambitious computational paradigm
http://venturebeat.com/2013/11/29/sentient-code-an-inside-look-at-stephen-wolframs-utterly-new-insanely-ambitious-computational-paradigm/
Today, Wolfram gave me a glimpse under the hood in an hour-long conversation. And I have to say, what I saw was amazing.
In 1988 he released the first version of Mathematica, a platform for technical computation, and in 2009, he released the Wolfram Alpha search engine, a computational knowledge engine. His new project, he says, is a perfect marriage.
“Mathematica is this perfect precise computation engine, and WolframAlpha is general information about the world,” Wolfram told me. “Now we can combine the two.”
The combination is just part of the picture. Included in the new project is natural language programming — not that a program can be created exclusively with natural language, but that a developer can use some natural language. Also included is a new definition of literally anything in your application — from code to images to results to inputs — as being usable and malleable as a symbolic expression. There’s a whole new level of automation and a completely divergent approach to building a programming language, away from the small, agile core with functionality pushed out to libraries and modules and toward a massive holistic thing which treats data and code as one. And there’s a whole new focus on computation that knows more about the world than the programmer ever could.
Google wants to understand objects and things and their relationships so it can give answers, not just results. But Wolfram wants to make the world computable, so that our computers can answer questions like “where is the International Space Station right now.”
That’s not static data; that’s a combination of computation with knowledge. WolframAlpha does that today, but that is just the beginning.
In about 30 seconds, Wolfram created a small web application that drew circles on a web page and included a user interface so a visitor could make them bigger or smaller, or change their colors. That’s doable simply because the Wolfram language — with its access to a vast reservoir of knowledge — knows what a circle is and can make it, and it automatically provides web-native user controls to manipulate it. It was a trivial example, but in another 30 seconds, Wolfram built a code snippet that defined the countries in South America and displayed their flags. Then he called up a map of Europe and highlighted Germany and France in different colors computationally, in seconds.
This is only possible because the new Wolfram computational framework includes the complex and precise algorithms developed in over 20 years of Mathematica development, plus the knowledge engine built up inside WolframAlpha.
And the results are shocking.
“The level of automation is incredibly higher than people could ever have before – it’s incredibly powerful,” Wolfram says. “Anything that WolframAlpha knows, your app knows.”
Currently, Wolfram meets many people who have an interesting idea or algorithm or application, but can’t complete it for lack of time or a team of developers or money. That could all change.
“It will spawn a whole mass of new startups,” Wolfram told me. “Now it becomes realistic for someone to build out a complete algorithm and automation system in a few hours.”
“Together with natural language inputs, it changes who can be a sophisticated programmer,” Wolfram says. “You’re writing programs that are only a few lines long – it’s a language where you can immediately get things done, not take 10 lines to get hello world. It will flatten out the landscape of who gets to write sophisticated programs.”
Of course, while there’s natural language input, there’s also a syntax and structure to Wolfram language, plus operators and other constructs that are still necessary to create a functioning, bug-free program that does what you want it to do. Which means that there’s still learning to do — no-one is going to start dictating in Wolfram and expect to build an app.
Where to Wolfram: Raspberry Pi, smartphones, devices
Those apps will live in many places.
Recently, Wolfram released a version of Mathematica for Raspberry Pi
if the Wolfram language is this vast monolithic thing full of the knowledge of the world, how does it fit on one little Pi?
“It’s a slightly complicated story,” Wolfram says. “The Wolfram engine is a rather portable kind of thing, but obviously the knowledge of the world is something that is a big thing … it’s centralized, it’s in the cloud, and it depends on feeds.”
So in the desktop version of Wolfram, the detailed mapping that he has been showing me comes seamlessly from the cloud. On Raspberry Pi, something similar is happening; the Pi is doing the “crunchy computation,” but ever so often, it’s reaching out the cloud for pieces of fruit and crust and whatever other data it needs.
People who are building web apps, Wolfram says, will likely use the Wolfram cloud to make that happen. But there will be private cloud solutions as well. Developers who are building mobile apps will be able to get an embedded version of the Wolfram engine, and then use an API to get whatever data you need. All code, however, can simply be copied and pasted between cloud and device and desktop — it’s all the same.
“Another way to do it is to use a function call from a native language like Java,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Stephen Wolfram
Introducing Tweet-a-Program
http://blog.wolfram.com/2014/09/18/introducing-tweet-a-program/
In the Wolfram Language a little code can go a long way. And to use that fact to let everyone have some fun, today we’re introducing Tweet-a-Program.
Compose a tweet-length Wolfram Language program, and tweet it to @WolframTaP. Our Twitter bot will run your program in the Wolfram Cloud and tweet back the result.
One can do a lot with Wolfram Language programs that fit in a tweet.