Hi Andy,

First you should become reasonably familiar with Mathematica. The best way to do this is to read the 'Introduction for Programmers' and 'An Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language'. by Stephen Wolfram, both available at the bottom of the Main Documentation page in Help. You may already have read these.

Mathematica is not Smalltalk or any other computer language. I think it pretty much transcends these other languages and it's not too useful to try to convert it to one of them. The time you might spend in doing that is lost to learning concepts and methods of machine learning.

I don't know why you should get immersed in an IDE. (Except possibly Workbench - but only for the purpose of documentation.) An external IDE is not Mathematica. It has nothing to do with Mathematica. In a very practical sense Mathematica is its own IDE. All the time you spend learning an IDE is time not spent on studying machine learning.

You don't need an IDE for debugging. Just put temporary Print statements in your code (usually inside a Module) to display intermediate results. I've found that always gets me to the problem and the solution.

I've been using Mathematica since 1996, just before Version 3 came out. I wrote most of the code and did much of the design of a Tensorial application (with Renan Cabrera), and a UnitsHelper package. And wrote and sold hundreds of copies of a Presentations package that started out just the way you are accumulating routines. I've been working for some time on a quite large Grassmann Algebra/Calculus application with John Browne. So my essay advice came from quite a bit of experience.

Package routines often grow out of notebook work. I put a Routines Section at the top of the notebook (also known as Package Purgatory) and put initial routines there. I always include a usage statement, a SyntaxInformation statement, and the routine itself. (Sometimes there are also Options, Attributes and error messages.) I make the routine an Initialization cell and use it for a while in the notebook. Then only after testing and using the routine for some time do I copy it into a package file (package Heaven). A package file in appearance is very much like a regular notebook. It can have Section headers and Text cells as well as the Initialization cells for the code. The entire process is easy and smooth. And the result meshes with the normal use of Mathematica.

Hi David, Ah yes, clarification - always a good idea! The back story is that I decided to spend a year using MMA exclusively (as far as possible). I really want to understand what I can and can't do in the system. Or, perhaps to put it more accurately, what I should and shouldn't use it for. I am particularly interested in exploring how machine learning might change the way I solve problems.

So far, I have found myself using MMA in two distinct modes: 1) exploring a problem, for which the notebook is a good model 2) building small utility applications, which I will want to reuse in whole, or part.

Because I come from a purely Object Oriented background (Smalltalk), I find myself thinking of functions as if they were objects, and that leads me to want to create instances of functions, hence the need to understand how to save, and reuse, with the minimum effort.

I went back and reread your essay on how to structure applications, and I found that very useful. I am going to adopt that structure when building this little utilities and see if it helps. I think I will also try Alan's suggestion about capturing my functions in a notebook, and then evaluating it at the start of each project. If I understand correctly, that will allow me to access the functions without wrapping them in any other function call.

In addition to the above, I am going to try out the IDE experiments. I am not sure at what point, in the development of a solution, one switches from the notebook to the IDE. Time will tell.

Making user-defined functions 2nd-class citizens is the same uglyness as having to import packages - something that WRI explicitly tries to automate - yet we have this ugly syntax:

ResourceFunction["AssociateToNested"][a, {"a", "b"} -> x]

versus 1-st class functions:

AssociateToNested[a, {"a", "b"} -> x]

Even Python's syntax is preferable.

Can you please submit to WFR a function that auto-converts f = ResourceFunction["f"] - I have hundreds in just my data toolkit - and resolves potential name-clashes? - The latter should be done on Wolfram's side, since they are in a position to view all definitions and can flag them.

Andy, yes, kind of. Your locally cached resource functions can be listed with ResourceFunction["LocalResourceObjects"]["Function"]. This includes both ones you've deployed locally, and ones you've previously downloaded from the WFR. Another resource that might be useful to you for maintaining a list of your frequently used resources is ResourceFunction["CreateResourceObjectGallery"].

Note: You can also get the notebook for starting a new Resource Function submission through the File menu of the desktop product in versions 11.3+ :)

Dear Andy,

How are you today? Here's the notebook I promised you a couple of weeks ago. Let me know if you have any questions.

Cheers, Micah

Attachments:

WolframLanguage_...nb

Hi David, Thank you for the link to your essay, that looks like a really useful approach. I will give that a try too.

Cheers Andy

Thank you Neil, and Alan. Both those suggestions sound great. I think I will try both approaches and see if one seems to fit my natural workflow better.

Cheers Andy

Andy,

Create a package. Workbench is good for debugging but is likely overkill to get started. You call the package by typing Needs[].

The easiest way is to put all the functions in a single notebook (or call one notebook from another). In options inspector check off to save a package when you save the notebook (I’m not on my computer so I can’t look up the option’s exact title)

Regards

Neil

Workbench, http://www.wolfram.com/workbench/, is a standard-issue Wolfram product and, as near as I can tell, the only officially endorsed mechanism to create documentation which is integrated into the help system.

It is pretty simple once you get it set up.