A while ago, inspired by this article Frontiers of Computational Thinking: A SXSW Report by Stephen Wolfram, I looked-up the Wolfram Language. It is described as a very powerful symbolic language with built-in algorithms and knowledge base and indeed it looks quite impressive: you can accomplish a lot with just a few lines of code.
After signing up for a free account on the Wolfram Programming Cloud , I created a new Notebook and started playing with code from the Samples Gallery. Very soon I had to dive into the full documentation for more custom outputs from symbols like CityData.
I started by trying to output a dynamic map with conflicts in Europe over time, but unfortunately that information is not available yet in the knowledge base of the language (this could be done by getting the info from other data-sources, but I decided to skip this). I ended up writing a small code snippet that outputs as an image the cities population distribution map for Romania; it is quite impressive how much can be achieved with only 2 lines:
What’s more impressive is that the code can be deployed as a webapp / api / mobile app / apple watch app .. basically you get fast & easy integration out of the box.
The free plan offers only 100 Wolfram Programming Cloud API calls / month, which can be an impediment in exploring the possibilities offered by the Wolfram Language, but it should be enough if you only want to get a quick look over it. However Wolfram has a pilot program that offers the Wolfram Language and Mathematica for free (non commercial use), on Raspberry Pi Noobs.
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