Stephen Wolfram's Free Book Teaches the Wolfram Language To Kids 105
theodp writes: Stephen Wolfram received a PhD in particle physics at age 20 (his thesis committee included Richard Feynman). So it's probably not too surprising that Wolfram's new book, An Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language (free on the web), aspires to teach those new to programming how to do much more than just move Minecraft and Star Wars characters around. "The goal of the book," explains Wolfram in a blog post, "is to take people from zero to the point where they know enough about the Wolfram Language that they can routinely use it to create programs for things they want to do. And when I say 'zero', I really mean 'zero'. This is a book for everyone. It doesn't assume any knowledge of programming, or math (beyond basic arithmetic), or anything else. It just starts from scratch and explains things. I've tried to make it appropriate for both adults and kids. I think it'll work for typical kids aged about 12 and up."
Starting from Scratch? (Score:2, Funny)
>This is a book for everyone. It doesn't assume any knowledge of programming, or math (beyond basic arithmetic), or anything else. It just starts from scratch and
>explains things.
I thought MIT Scratch was programming. I must be really confused.
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yeah - this really is "from scratch" I read the first few pages - including some of the Q&A. The detail is amazing. The kinds of questions he anticipates - he is trying to teach all possible knowledge
Although, I did find the Machine Learning section pretty cool.
Stephen Wolfram's greatest talent (Score:4, Insightful)
The Wolfram Language represents a major advance in programming
languages that makes leading-edge computation accessible to everyone.
Unique in its approach of building in vast knowledge and automation,
the Wolfram Language scales from a single line of easy-to-understand
interactive code to million-line production systems.
This guy has serious talent in math, science and computers, but his self-promotion skills rival P.T. Barnum.
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"The older I get, the more I've learned that these wunderkind child prodigies that get advanced degrees before they're old enough to drink (in the US) are more the result of political connections and corruption (and probably gaslighting asshole managers) than anything else."
Jealous, much? As for the rest of your self pitying deluded grievances, nobody fucking cares. Get help.
Re:Stephen Wolfram's greatest talent (Score:5, Insightful)
The older I get, the more I've learned that these wunderkind child prodigies that get advanced degrees before they're old enough to drink (in the US) are more the result of political connections and corruption (and probably gaslighting asshole managers) than anything else.
I seriously doubt that anyone who had Richard Feynman on his thesis committee skated by on his degree.
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Re:Stephen Wolfram's greatest talent (Score:4, Interesting)
However Feynman always insisted had no special talents. [youtube.com] He credited curiosity and hard work for his success.
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How does one get a degree with 6+ years of prerequisites which are only available after getting a high school diploma, which requires wasting time in high school learning underwater basket weaving for at least 4 years, which requires another 3 years wasting time being bullied in middle school, which requires another 6 years wasting time at the K-5 level being forced to endure basic shit you mastered in 2nd grade over and over again while being told that because you were assigned the male gender at birth, yo
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I'd accept time travel as an adequate solution before believing that it's possible to, completely unaided by corruption, money, and connections, earn a PhD at 20 on merit alone.
You seem to be under the impression that the bell curve has limits on its extremities. Perhaps listening to some Mozart or Beethoven might dissuade of this restrictive idea.
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I can appreciate that you're bitter over your humanities Ph.D, but I would really like some fries with my Big Mac.
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Oh, I assure you my career is quite secure, friend, but have fun trying to stay one step ahead of the influx of H1B dirtbags.
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Sorry, but both Mozart's and Beethoven's compositions written before they reached their mid twenties are mediocre at best and, especially in Mozart's case, completely forgettable.
No one - including the 150+ IQ genius - is good at something before time and effort have been invested into excelling at that something. You may scoff at the 10000-hours idea, but I challenge you to show one example of someone being fantastic at what he/she's doing right from the start, without countless hours of practice and study
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No one - including the 150+ IQ genius - is good at something before time and effort have been invested into excelling at that something. You may scoff at the 10000-hours idea, but I challenge you to show one example of someone being fantastic at what he/she's doing right from the start, without countless hours of practice and study being invested in their craft.
What about this guy [youtu.be]? Sure, an exception to the rule, but still, an exception.
Re:Stephen Wolfram's greatest talent (Score:5, Informative)
I myself was curious, so I looked it up on Wikipedia.
Seems like he educated himself in particle physics when he was very young (started publishing papers at age 15), got accepted early by St. John's College when he applied at age 17, switched to CalTech at age 19, and got his Ph.D. a year later.
Now, obviously he was allowed to fast forward through the years of grinding that are normally required before you can enter college or work on a Ph.D. thesis. Given that he was already publishing widely cited physics papers at the age of 18, that was probably a good call on the part of his instructors.
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Oh, so its sort of like an "honorary degree" given to people who are "exceptional" but didn't actually do the work. Got it.
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Any student is able to test out of a class (meaning they get full credit for the class) which would allow for this to happen.
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Most of 'em.
See CLEP [wikipedia.org].
It's a good way to lighten your coarse load. It's not horribly unusual for people to use CLEP to graduate a semester or two early.
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Because none of those things are actually true. Wikipedia has an article list
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How does one get a degree with 6+ years of prerequisites which are only available after getting a high school diploma, which requires wasting time in high school [...] Something simply doesn't add up about these 20 year old PhD wunderkinds.
[...] before believing that it's possible to, completely unaided by corruption, money, and connections, earn a PhD at 20 on merit alone.
Simple, don't waste years getting a high school diploma, and rapidly get (e.g. in ~1 year) or skip getting an undergraduate degree.
Thousands of young teens (under 18) get advanced placement in universities every year. The mainstream media generally has a story of some wunderkid getting a PhD by the time (or before) they are old enough to get a driver's license (i.e. 16) about every 5 to 10 years. They generally have to get a medical doctorate or such to be particularly newsworthy.
University admissions is pr
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Cole Miller, one of my friends in grad school at Caltech, started the Ph.D. program in physics at age 16, and was 21 or 22 when he got his degree. That's not far from Wolfram's age when he got his Ph.D. I entered Caltech in 1984, talked to two people who knew Wolfram personally, and I never heard any hint of "corruption, money, and connections" -- just some quibbling over intellectual property rights to SMP, the predecessor of Mathematica. (No question about who wrote it, mind you, just who owned it.)
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If you look at Wolfram's career it's clear he didn't get where he is because the fix was in; but that career also suggests why physics isn't dominated by these single-minded prodigies. What obsesses you at 15 probably won't hold the same fascination when you're 21, over a third of your life later. But you can use your Phd-stamped prodigy card to make a lateral career move.
There are a few landmark physicists who got their PhDs fairly young-ish, say 22-24; but when you're 20, 2-4 years more is still a long t
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Heisenberg joined a paramilitary group to overthrow the government of Bavaria.
Yes, and this early experiment in right wing terrorism certainly helped impress the Nazis and get him a cushy job later on.
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What obsesses you at 15
Sex?
probably won't hold the same fascination when you're 21, over a third of your life later.
Still the same?
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PhD in particle physics at age 20
Then he got distracted by some little side project and ended up never making any contribution to the field of particle physics.
what a failure.
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Then he got distracted by some little side project and ended up never making any contribution to the field of particle physics.
what a failure.
You mean other than the many papers he wrote, had published, and had been extensively cited about particle physics.
Yeah what a fucking failure. What a disgrace of a man.
is it $5 a month? (Score:4, Interesting)
I was trying to figure out where I can use the language. I found something that looked like a portal for about $5 a month. is that the intended way to use this. Is the a free junior version of this somewhere? $5 isn't bad at all if you use it frequently but I'd rather learn it and see if I actually use it for free.
Re:is it $5 a month? (Score:4, Informative)
You can get it for the Raspberry Pi at no cost, so I assume there's (nonfree) linux packages.
http://www.wolfram.com/raspberry-pi/?source=nav
It's free (no cost) for non commercial use and there are packages for noobs and raspbian.
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I'm not sure why you call the use of packages 'for noobs'.
Packages are a nice and clean way to install and remove software from a computer. If you want to compile yourself, sure go ahead but 90% of the users have no reason at all to do so.
Had you called it 'for the lazy among us' i'd understand it as a joke. But calling those lazy users 'noobs' is a bit far stretched and unfounded.
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Then use the fucking capital letters or tell those idiots to find a less confusing acronym.
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Or, for that matter, closed source. If you don't know already, guess what Excel does. "Outlook" doesn't sound like a mail client with scheduling capability to me. Heck, in my first computing job (on 370s) we used a very useful program called HASP. Want to guess what that did? (Answer: it was the Houston Aerospace Spooling Program or something like that, and it would do things like read entire card decks at once and spool the contents on demand, instead of letting OS/370 read a card at a time while ru
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I was trying to figure out where I can use the language. I found something that looked like a portal for about $5 a month. is that the intended way to use this. Is the a free junior version of this somewhere? $5 isn't bad at all if you use it frequently but I'd rather learn it and see if I actually use it for free.
Check out http://www.wolfram.com/programming-lab/ which has several free options.
If you want people to learn programming... (Score:3, Interesting)
... it helps if you make it fun. Ok, some people will learn anyway because they're really into it, but others - especially kids - won't unless its fun. Which is why Logo did well back in the 80s with moving a virtual or real turtle around.
Looking at his book it seems to me "fun" wasn't exactly in his top 10 ToDo list when writing it. For most people it will be about as much fun as having a tooth pulled. Lists and barcharts in chapter 4? Seriously? Fine in the MS Excel manual, not so great in a beginners book targeted at people who wouldn't normally think about learning programming.
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Looking at his book it seems to me "fun" wasn't exactly in his top 10 ToDo list when writing it.
So... back to Minecraft?
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I never used Logo, because none of the schools I attended in the 80s taught programming until high school, and by that age BASIC and Pascal were the languages of choice.
That said, I first learned BASIC by drawing things on an Atari 800. It was just PLOT and DRAWTO statements, so to do anything interesting you had to use loops and conditionals. It was a blast.
I can see where Logo would have been popular in the places it was taught.
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All my university classes used Mathematica.
Which was invented by ... Stephen Wolfram. Funny old world. To the trolls: he already has a very successful language for scientific/engineering computation. This is something new.
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Considering all university classes use MATLAB. Nice try to get kids indoctrinated to your shitty product though, bro.
We used GNU Octave in mine. But you could use MATLAB too if you wanted.
For the Hermione Grangers of the world, I guess (Score:2)
Anything with a title that begins "An Elementary Introduction ..." isn't likely to inspire staying up late with your friends.
My kids went right after that Scratch / Minecraft skin and Hour of Code stuff because it was Minecraft-related, and also because the examples provided actually DID something ... and did it quickly, and it was Kind of Fun. It also Just Works in the browser. No significant barrier to entry, you don't even need Minecraft ... since it's just a Scratch skin running in the browser ... any b
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Why, yes, the Really Smart Guy who got his PhD when he was 20 and subsequently created Mathematica and then the Wolfram language ... he made something intended to help people learn stuff.
I would say the Hermione Grangers of the world is probably fairly apt ... he sure as hell wasn't targeting the morons of the world.
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Sure. It's just not going to get legions of run-of-the-mill twelve year olds to lap it up with the same eagerness as the other materials which have been created to appeal to that age group.
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Right - he's targeting the other nerds out there. Remember when this site was "News for Nerds"? I would have loved this when I was you. The Scratch-style stuff I would have long outgrown and dismissed as kids stuff by 12, if the tools had been around.
Better than Swift! (Score:2)
Do they have the flag of Switzerland in Swift? No.
Wolfram: 1
Swift: 0
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print("\u{1F1E8}\u{1F1ED}")
Wolf, Ram, and Heart (Score:1)
Attn: Wolfram Usability Testing
1. I took me 10 minutes to figure out a "Wolfram Notebook", needed for these exercises, is not a product by itself, with an easy-to-find link, but part of lab.wolfram.com.
2. The first hello world program, solve 2+2: fails with "syntax error". It turns out you don't need the colon. I assume the colon is part of the section header of the text, but it is not obvious to leave it out.
3. 2+2= similarly gives bad results. Fair enough, but it is more logical than a colon, or nothi
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Oh, I forgot to add this notebook is almost useless on a cell phone like a Galaxy S6 in either landscape or portrait mode, as the right hand side, the non-notebook side, is too wide and "wins", and the pop up keyboard on the phone covers too much given the non-notebook real estate budget you demand.
Perhaps this is true notebook or desktop only, ok, but why rely on shift if so?
"take people from zero" (Score:2)
And when I say 'zero', I really mean 'zero'.
What, like the moment of conception?
A new kind of science (Score:2, Interesting)
Stephen Wolfram - A new kind of science - the kind you have to pay for.
The language isn't free.
From what I can tell you must pay $10/mo to $15/mo in order to "save your notebook".
How nice of him to give out free books that teach about his non-free language.
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When I was younger, we paid for our compilers and liked it! I spent thousands of dollars in the 70s through 90s on assorted compilers and interpreters, because there were no good free ones for the systems I used. I paid for Pascal, C, C++, and Lisp compilers. Nowadays, of course, I can get gcc and sbcl free for my Linux box.
Kids these days. Get off my lawn.
Sigh, another perl, PL/1, snobol, etc, etc (Score:2)
I suspect very few 12 year olds are going look at this. Wolfram may be genius but a usability expert he is not. The Wolfram Language, his name, looks like something a mathematician would come up... "Let's see I've used all the math symbols already so let's start using all the punctuation symbols to do other actions! And I can combine punctuation symbols for more actions so I don't have to type too much!"
Where space is expensive, terseness is needed. Everywhere else it's the terseness that is expensive. Stee
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So,
two plus three
is much more readable than
2+3
?
Maybe if you never learned basic arithmetic.
For those of us with limited short-term memory - which would be all of us - who have bothered to learn a notation, terseness allows us to hold more complex expressions in our working memory. Clearly you've never progressed beyond very simple thoughts.
Convert code samples to octave (Score:1)
Wolfram: Plus[3,7]
octave: sum([3,7])
I'll always hate Uppercase functions. Unless that's supposed to be some kind of class constructor.
No thanks (Score:1)