Jordan Santell

I hate to be that guy, but I wish to share my opinion about closed source mathematical software. There is no doubt that what Wolfram Research has done with Mathematica is amazing and tempting. It is a very complete and uniform engine, and can be very useful for very different kinds of mathematics. However, Wolfram Research deliberately keeps their methods and source code closed. Note that this is more serious than just the "Stallman-esque" open-source-everything philosophy. Wolfram insists that users do not need to know implementation details of their methods. This is plainly in their documentation. You can see the uncompelling argument from Wolfram here [6]. The gist of the argument is that interfaces matter, not implementations. I strongly argue that users, especially mathematicians and engineers, should care about the internals of mathematical software, especially when it's being used, even in a utilitarian fashion, for research and engineering. Not only this, but Wolfram has litigated against his own employees for publishing mathematical proofs about cellular automata. Information about this lawsuit is sparse, but evidence of it can be seen in [0]. More information can be found here [1]. Unfortunately most responses to the above from users of Mathematica is "well I just use Mathematica as a calculator, nothing serious" or "I wouldn't look at the source code anyway, so what gives?" It's an unfortunate response, and I don't have a technical rebuttal, but a moral one,…

Oh I hadn't realized I was dealing with another of his sock puppets. It is slander against them as I point out in [my comment on your comment](http://symbo1ics.com/blog/?p=788) . If you cut out all use of the text from #haskell, it would be just another uninformed farrago of lies about Haskell, like the other one you generate in your comment -- the one about the Monad type class, there are perhaps several other -- which is a criminal slander directed against Philip Wadler in particular. He introduced type classes in the late 80's thinking in particular of ML. See the papers assembled on http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/topics/type-classes.html (It is by the way this rather unremarkable use of type classes that is the source of your difficulties). Note that even in the 1995 co-authored paper "Type classes in Haskell" makes no mention of a Monad typeclass; indeed type classes that operate not on individual types, but on type formers like Maybe or IO etc. are no where envisaged. Later, following the lead of Moggi's 'monadic' semantical doctrine, he saw that a programming language could internalize this idea, and moreover that he could introduce a type class Monad into Haskell itself, a move far outstripping anything you could previously have anticipated from the type class concept. Papers on this are to be found here http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/topics/monads.html Haskell was well under way before this move was made. Type class Monad was a rather late…

And after you read this you should read this: http://symbo1ics.com/blog/?p=1089 which was kind of fun as well.

Check out this article here comparing Common Lisp and Scheme. I'm not the author, but I thought it was a really helpful overview of the differences between them, and I hope it will help you all too. http://symbo1ics.com/blog/?p=729

For anyone that had trouble learning the condition system, or just wants another example, this helped me: http://symbo1ics.com/blog/?p=1405

Gaaah, knock off the CAPSLOCK and the machismo, please. Also, you don't need to invent backcronyms for CAR/CDR, they're now called first/rest. Having said that, I really like the presentation of your blog, nice typography. And after skimming your book[1] in progress, and noting your obvious theoretical bent and taste for rigor, I can only anticipate to read more of your future posts (latch on to something "obscure" like ACL2 and make something fun with it.) [1] http://symbo1ics.com/blog/?page_id=77 [Edit: The book has code samples in 4 different languages; LISP (the ancient cap-cased "one"), ML, C, and what looks like Pascal. If you want to learn about the axiomatic specification of computer programs, specially for "structured" programming, then look into the works of Gries and others, specially in the silver "Texts and Monographs In Computer Science" books (the entire series is a feast of delight that should be devoured, and washed down with heirloom, stolen wine): The Science of Programming, Gries. The Design of Well-Structured and Correct Programs, Alagic and Arbib. The selection Programming Methodology edited by Gries has various approaches to the structured method, with contributions from Dijkstra, Hoare, Wirth, Reynolds and other rock-stars of axiomatic semantics and verification.]