Hello Wolfram

During lunch I got a few minutes to try out Wolfram – the new language from the Wolfram Research team. In fact, the language was even already installed on my Raspberry Pi device, without me knowing. After updating the packages I typed in “wolfram” and was tossed into the language prompt. Looking online for a first quick example got me to type in

Interpreter["City"]["NYC"]

But that didn´t go all that well. Ok, on to the next one:

CountryData["UnitedStates", "Population"]

The response was:

Installing data from Wolfram Research data server ....
Out[3]= 3.1933 10^8

Cool! Although it took a while to receive the response. Ok, so one more:

WeatherData[$GeoLocation, "Temperature"]

Gave:

Installing data from Wolfram Research data server ....
Initializing WeatherData indices ....
Initializing WeatherData indices .... Out[5]= 17.

Which correlates somewhat to my phone’s estimate of the temperature at my location (14). And finally:

WeatherData["Stockholm", "Temperature"]

Again the response that followed:

Installing data from Wolfram Research data server ....
Initializing CityData indices ....
Initializing CityData indices ....
Initializing CityData indices ....
Initializing CityData indices ....
Initializing CityData indices ....
No more memory available.
Mathematica kernel has shut down.
Try quitting other applications and then retry.

Ooops! And it took a while, well over 5 minutes. But despite this little setback it is a tell of what will come in terms of programming in relation to the cloud. A lot (understatement) of data will be available at the fingertips of everything from toasters to wallets. In fact – all devices will be able to utilize the collective intelligence that can be synthesized through the vast amounts of data that make up Big Data and the cloud. It is good to know about these possibilities from a technical point of view, but the really big question is – how can this help us put the user-experience of internet of things in the front seat?