Looking back at the history of UK educational computing, it started when I was at school with feeble 8-bit micros and painful programming languages it then moved on to the hugely influential wave of the BBC Micro and thereafter into the world of Wintel PCs. The Pi deserves to be huge, and it should be mandatory for every schoolchild to have one. However, the NeXT was a multi-thousand-dollar workstation, while the Raspberry Pi fits in your pocket (almost in your wallet), and costs less than a decent round of drinks down the pub. Performance isn’t exactly scorching, reminiscent of a computer from the late 1990s, but – and this is most important – it’s fast enough.Īctually, Wolfram claims its performance on the Pi is comparable to – maybe even faster than – the NeXT cubes on which Mathematica first shipped. A few minutes more and I had a full Mathematica workbook displayed on there, too. Getting my Pi up and running was simple, and within a few minutes I had a full GUI running on my lounge TV set. No wonder it’s becoming hugely influential and is selling like hot cakes. Alright, so you need to add a mains power supply, and maybe a case, but this is commodity computing of a size, cheapness and power we have never witnessed before. On the Pi, you can do this for free, on a computer board the size of a playing card, for less than £30. Wolfram Language runs on any hardware, from Raspberry Pi to supercomputer cluster, either locally or in the cloud – you choose. It cruelly highlights the poor quality of the HTML ports of tools such as Microsoft Excel and Word (their web versions may be okay, often even useful, but they’re hampered by their history). If ever proof were required that you can build rich applications inside a web browser, this is it. Wolfram has been doing incredible work with this language, even offering a fully web-based HTML5 version of Mathematica. Now the company has started talking publicly about the Wolfram Language, the underlying platform for all of its engines from Alpha to Mathematica.

Wolfram mathematica raspberry pi