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WOLFRAM / Different Kind of Equals

I've explored Wolfram Language (cloud) in a heuristic fashion for about a week now. Although still in infancy mode, and I was only doing trivial commands, things get interesting and fun really quickly.

If you are also interested to look into Wolfram, then "An Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language" book by Stephen Wolfram and Wolfram Programming Lab EXPLORE should give you some stuffs to try and think about.

You will get used to seeing single liner syntax like below:

Commands[ Commands [ {List of Entity}, Argument, Argument] ] 

The powerful thing about Wolfram Language is that of the DATA KNOWLEDGE and the way it displays INFORMATION and CAN present it back to user in visual, audio, and interactive rich almost instantly.

SEE ALSO: Mathematica Language => this Mathematica also uses Wolfram Language (or more correctly, Wolfram Language is originated from Mathematica. And if you like to do calculations and algorithm, I think Mathematica is great.

Wolfram knows a lot, and so you can query pretty much everything of ENTITY (that Wolfram knows), and then it will give you back data information that you can further process.

WARNING!
One thing that I must warn you about Wolfram, compared to other programming language, is that Wolfram Language is very HIGH LEVEL programming language, and it even takes natural human language query. You will find that everything feels easy. However, easy can be double sided sword. Python is probably the next language you should learn after Wolfram, if you want to take programming to the next level.

In Wolfram Language, like other languages, you will still be dealing with:

  • Data, Properties and Value
  • Expressions
  • Iterations => Table
  • Numbers and Strings
  • List, Array
  • Variables
  • Functions
  • Arithmetic
  • Graphics, Sound, Images
Stephen Wolfram in his video tutorials mentioned a lot that in Wolfram Language, everything is Expressions. I think this means that everything is instant expression within expression, to give you something.


Below, I will just write about 3 special usages EQUAL SYMBOL specific to Wolfram Language.

Normally, in programming language we use EQUAL to assign or add value into a variable. Sometimes EQUAL EQUAL means comparison between value. However, things are pretty special in Wolfram.

TYPING A SINGLE "=" EQUAL (WITHOUT ANY WORDS BEFOREHAND)

Once you got that big orange equal symbol, you can type any kind of human natural language query, hit Enter and it will spit back some kind of ENTITY related to that topic.


You can then continue on and apply all kind of "information processing" (image entity in this case) using commands. For example, below I am using ColorNegate[] command, that will instantly inverse the color of the photo.


TYPING CTRL + EQUAL 

Followed by natural language query of anything, and then you may add additional "Properties" (or attributes) that is related to the previous ENTITY. Then you hit SHIFT + ENTER, in order for Wolfram to process your query.

HINTS: You can query all the PROPERTIES of ENTITY, by using EntityProperties[] command.


For me personally, CTRL + EQUAL is one of the most useful query because it almost always give you the ENTITY (or some kind of objects) that Wolfram knows. Which you can use further to extract, filter, and so on.



CTRL + EQUAL, also allows you to quickly use natural language within your code.



TYPING EQUAL+EQUAL

Followed by natural language query will give you back Wolfram Alpha interpretation. The result can be a bit slow to calculate, probably depends on your subscription. I am using the FREE access to Wolfram Language.


So far so good, a taste of Wolfram Language EQUAL Query for you!


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