The Secret Life of a Mathematica Expression

Location:

Seacliff A/B

Track:

Time:

Wednesday, 2:50pm - 3:40pm

Abstract:

Mathematica is an expensive platform for technical computing used by applied mathematicians and engineers. While Mathematica is an immensely powerful and productive system it isn't on the radar of most practitioners of the computer arts. Sadly, the computer science crowd never gets to see the beautiful programming language that is the heart of Mathematica. Of course the Mathematica Programming Language is a functional programming language and a dynamically typed one at that.

Because we are interested in "(Post)Functional" matters I will also expose some of the other features of the language that are like nothing else in the world of programming. I hope to give enough of a taste of Mathematica to encourage software developers to give Mathematica a try for their prototyping and algorithm design.

David Leibs

David Leibs is a Senior Researcher at Oracle Labs. His research interests include Graphical Programming Languages, Compiler Front-ends, Domain Specific Languages, Meta-Programming, Active Libraries, and Array Programming languages. David is currently in the Virtual Machine Research Group working on a "reactive" and "lively" graphical programming interface used for technical computing. In his past David was responsible for productizing Smalltalk-80 at Xerox Parc and ParcPlace and was responsible for Visualworks. He has used Mathematica for 15 years.