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Mathematica 6.0 has been released today! Mathematica 6 has gone in a different direction than any of it's predecessors. It allows users to create dynamic interfaces quickly and easily. It also allows interactivity beyond what any previous version offered.

Mathematica is a highly interactive functional programming language that allows almost anyone to produce mathematical models and simple code with little knowledge of computer science. With Mathematica 6 it allows users to create interactive dynamic interfaces in a few lines of code that would take a traditional programming language thousands of lines to produce. Mathematica has the ability to connect to the internet and databases, parse xml, has regular expression functionality, and anything else that I would need for my day to day programming tasks. Even though it was originally built for mathematicians and scientist, almost anybody can benefit from using Mathematica for their programming needs.

Along with Mathematica 6, Wolfram Research also released a free Mathematica Player that allows you to download and run free Mathematica notebooks from Wolfram's Demonstration Project and allows you to experience what Mathematica 6 can do!

I was surprised the other day when someone came into ##php on freenode wanted a strange feature when he hit a wall designing his app with exceptions. He wanted something like the following:

//NOTE THIS IS NOT POSSIBLE, IT'S BULLCRAP!!
try {
  throw new Exception("throw an exception");
} catch (Exception $e) {
  //do something with a thrown exception.
} else {
  //do something if there wasn't an exception thrown.
}

That's right, he wanted an 'else' for a try/catch block. My mind was blown, surely he was using exceptions wrongly. After I did some inquiring on why he wanted such a ridiculous feature, I found out he was indeed misusing exceptions. He was using exceptions to control his code execution flow. Using them to drive his application by recoverable errors. He was quite defensive about it too! I decided if there weren't enough blog articles about correct exception usage, there needed to be one more...