Man, I miss Wolfram Language. Once you've twisted your brain a little to grok its usage, it's such an incredibly high-value tool, especially for exploration and prototyping. I saw it more as a do-anything software tool for researchers rather than as a language aimed at programmers, so I put on a researcher hat and tried to forget everything I knew as a professional programmer, and had a few memorable seasons with it around 2016-2020. I remember calculating precisely which days of the year would cause the sunlight to pass through a window and some glass blocks in an internal wall, creating a beautiful light show indoors. It only took a couple of minutes to get a nice animated visualisation and a calendar.
Nowadays I'd probably just ask Claude to figure it out for me, but pre LLMs, WL was the highest value tool for thought in my toolbox.
(Edit: and they actually offer perpetual licenses!)
Interesting. I have always felt I am missing out on not using tools like Mathematica or MatLab. I see some people doing everything using MatLab, including building GUI and DL models, which I found surprising for a single software suite, and - nowadays - one that is quite affordable (at least the home edition).
Mathematica seems a little pricey but maybe it would motivate me to learn more math.
I would love to read what non-mathematicians use MatLab, Mathematica, and Maple for.
To be honest, it is very strange how hard it is to teach programming concepts, for some reason almost all humans use computers but only 0.1% or so can program them.
I am not sure we have the 'best way' to teach anything computer related.
People develop world model for physics quite early, they know they can pull with a rope but cant push with a rope.
And they get intuition, things that are thrown up, go down, and they can transfer this intuition in the math, because math is real.
For some reason its hard to do that with code. People keep trying to push with a rope, even after studying for many years.
PS: I am trying to teach her neural networks now and am working on this RNN board game https://punkx.org/projekt0/book/part2/rnn.html to fight the "square" dragon. I want her to develop good world model for neural networks, so that she understands what chatgpt is. I just keep experimenting, sometimes things click, sometimes not.