Whilst perusing Twitter yesterday I came across a post that truly blew my mind (thank you @stevestreeting). It is a video posted by Stephen Wolfram of Wolfram Research talking about the up and coming release of Wolfram Language.
In my university years I had spent some time using Wolfram Research's Mathematica software, and even back then (we're talking more than a decade now) I was blown away by how clever it was in working out tricky calculus problems and plotting beautiful 3D graphs.
When they released their Wolfram Alpha knowledge engine a few years back (https://www.wolframalpha.com/) I was especially excited to see some of that functionality I had played around with in Mathematica be made available to the general public and the fact that it was tied into a ridiculous amount of big data from across the web made the project even more astounding.
However, nothing has blown me away as much as seeing what the Wolfram Language can do. It's like the awesome power of Mathematica elegantly blended with huge amounts of data from the web and all presented via a well documented API. Like a wonderful black forest gateau of delicious technological marvels. I can't help but think this is going to have an enormous impact on web technology over the next decade or so. It is going to make big data easily accessible by the hoards of web developers out there who, with their exceptional creative talents, will no doubt do some truly amazing things.
Fuse with this the growing buzz around wearable computing and technologies like spritzinc.com and there is no way that the frantic pace of web technology is going to let up.
I simply can't wait!!
Here's the video.
