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I wish the various papers linked in that page used a different language than Wolfram Alpha to illustrate the various concepts, especially since that language doesn't support even basic functional constructs such as pattern matching.

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I am very confused by this comment. While I do find the Wolfram language difficult to read and generally obfuscated, it definitely has a ton of advanced functional constructs. If anything, simple pattern matching is the main way I used to write code in Mathematica.

Among the typical "scientific computing" languages, Wolfram is the only one that has "cool" functional programming tricks as the standard way to solve a problem in it.

1: https://reference.wolfram.com/language/guide/RulesAndPattern...

P.S. Seriously! The amazing functional style of Mathematica is pretty much the one thing I like about it.

I've only worked through the first paper thus far, but translating it all to Scheme has been a great help in understanding what is going on. If it had been in a nicer language by default, I think I would have lost something from the explanations.

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