@rm-rf you are around?

@Rojo Btw, is that you?

@halirutan It's me on a costume

@Rojo Is there a reason for that? I mean I got quite used to the red square

@halirutan It went away when I edited the profile mail, and then got lazy to put it back

Then rm told me it could be done from SE, so I'll be doing it soon probably

@Rojo So you don't use gravatar...

@halirutan Well, I had to use it to put in the red square, then I forgot all abou tit

@Rojo Btw, have you upvoted for Todd Gayley's answer?

@halirutan Yeah, but I hadn't seen the update

Checking it out now

@Rojo It's really nice when some of the experienced Wolfram guys put some effort here.

@Rojo btw, is it important that all the functions be defined after getting into debug mode?

@halirutan Definately

@rm-rf Yeah

@Rojo Ah, sorry. My mistake then... I did redefine the 2 functions that I used, but they in turn depend on other functions that were loaded from a function at the start of the session (before debug).

@rm-rf I definately don't exactly know when it works well and when it doesn't

but it always seems to help to define all in debug mode

Hmm... now comes the problem of interpreting the timings...

N | T1 | h[g[f[x]]]
N | T2 | g[f[x]]
N | T3 | f[x]
N | T4 | f[x_]

@Rojo If I get a table like this, is this a correct interpretation: On average, computing h[g[f[x]]] took (T1 - T2)/N seconds?

@rm-rf Any special attributes?

@Rojo No attributes

To all the experienced Mathematica programmers: I'm through three-fourths of "Programming with Mathematica: An Introduction" by Paul Wellin which was a decent introduction. I'm wondering whether I should look at Leonid's book next, or Wagner's "Power programming with Mathematica: The Kernel"?

@Aky Wagner book is freely available as scanned PDF somewhere on stackexchange Mma pages... and it's legal

Finding a book that'd be as up to date as Wellin book is might be a challenge.

@kirma @kirma, I'm aware that the Wagner book is legally available, and since some people went through a lot of trouble to make freely distributable, I'm assuming there must be something special about it. I do know it's old though.

@All,Hi guys

I has been working in Mathematica 9.0,in our organization we got WebMathematica.I am struggling for initialization .finally using WebMathematica user guide,I installed Java,Apache Tomcat.

I unpacked the WebMathematica.zip and I modified`MSPConfiguration.xml` file.

that corresponding code is below.

<KernelExecutable>C:\Program Files\Wolfram Research\MathKernel.exe</KernelExecutable>

I stuck here...I didn't understood the next steps.

can anyone suggest me

I following the below link

support.wolfram.com/kb/3230

@Aky Thankfully there is very little that would have changed on core kernel functionality of Mma kernel over last two decades or so...

For many other parts, books that introduce Mma even with version 7 start to age very quickly in my opinion

@J.M. Good morning! (Or whatever it is there:) )

@belisarius It's evening here. Buenos dias, belisarius. :)

@kirma That would likely be the "new in version 7" bits... ;) In contrast, Nest[] and Fold[] are timeless.

@Aky It's also a bit old, but if you can spare some time, look at Maeder's book, too.

@J.M. Magandang gabi, JM

:D

@J.M. I tried to imply that domain-specific functionality has seen plenty of improvements, but kernel/core language itself has been without much change to speak of (which is what one would actually expect)

domain-specific improvements become most obvious when reading some general introduction text and seeing what they don't mention by a word, or give their own rather convoluted solutions that seem odd after trying out new features on version X

@kirma "give their own rather convoluted solutions that seem odd after trying out new features on version X" - that too; witness the loads of books that suggested Plus @@ list way before Total[] came along.

yep yep

@kirma I think Wellin's book (the one I'm currently reading) is recent enough (maybe uses ver. 8, not sure) but doesn't really cover advanced concepts. However if the core of mma hasn't changed much, then an older book to study the more advanced concepts shouldn't be a problem.

@J.M. I don't think Maeder's book (if you mean "Programming with Mathematica") is available online, so it's not an option for me.

@Aky Wellin's book is based on version 8, yes.

@Aky Ah, that's too bad. None of the libraries nearest to you have it?

@J.M. I'm in India atm, haven't seen the inside of a library here in years. There is one close by though, I might check it out. No idea what to expect though.

@Aky I see. It is too bad there is no readily accessible version of Maeder's fine work.

What do people think of a style like this for inline code in quote blocks:

instead of this (current):

@rm-rf is the difference only effective for messages?

The black text with gray bg on a yellow canvas is very jarring, IMO. This applies only to code, and the most popular use of code in quote blocks is to display messages (and orange gets us closer to a message look)

@YvesKlett Essentially anything entered between two back ticks, and in quote blocks, this is almost always used for Messages

I likes!

@rm-rf A bit too red; needs more yellow. (But that might just be my eyes or my screen.)

@J.M. Yes, the actual color can be chosen by Jin, but the general idea is what I was getting at

(I just picked an orange that was used on the site for user names on the front page)

Oh, okay. Other than that, I like it. :)

Ok, I'll collect a few more comments and then make a meta post. It's a trivial 2 line change for Jin

A cat with a piece of buttered toast attached to its back, butter side up, will not land on its feet. In fact the forces create by this configuration will cause the cat to hover.