That being said, despite my handicap in maths I did pick up Haskell, so it's not impossible. Haskell's community can, indeed, get a little bit annoying in its maths-focused way of speaking about things, but Erlang and Clojure both are very pragmatic functional programming languages that are not that hard to pick up because the tutorial information is written, seemingly, for programmers, not hard-core maths geeks. I've learnt three different functional languages now to reasonable proficiency (Haskell, Erlang, Clojure) and my own maths skills are extremely weak. Indeed many universities still place their computer science programs under the purview of the mathematics department.Īs for learning functional programming, you do not need to have a strong base in mathematics to learn it. Internally, Mathematica groups the objects that it operates on into different types: integers are distinct from real numbers lists are distinct from numbers.All programming is related to mathematics.

Yet you will find it extremely useful to be able to see the internal representation of such expressions as this will allow you to manipulate them in a consistent and powerful manner. When doing a simple arithmetic operation such as 3 + 4 ⋆ 5, you are usually not concerned with exactly how a system such as Mathematica actually performs the additions or multiplications. This means things like a simple computation, a data object, a graphic, the cells in your Mathematica notebook, even your notebook itself, all have a similar structure – they are all expressions, and an understanding of expressions is essential to mastering Mathematica. We will also look at how to define and name new expressions, how to combine them using logical operators, and how to control properties of your expressions through the use of attributes.Īlthough it may appear different at first, everything that you will work with in Mathematica has a similar underlying structure. In this chapter we focus on the Mathematica language with particular emphasis on the structure and syntax of expressions. Their structure, internal representation, and how they are evaluated are essential to understanding Mathematica.

Expressions are the basic building blocks from which everything is built.

Mathematica functional programming