What Is This? briefly

Algorithmatic.com aspires to serve as a global repository for algorithms from all fields, and as an easy-access environment for algorithm design and prototyping through Algorithmatic's programming language and in-browser IDE. Put simply, Algorithmatic.com is for algorithms what Wikipedia is for articles. Also, these algorithms are instantly executable from within the browser.

What Is This? take your time

The Problem

Academics and engineers constantly struggle with commercial scientific libraries in terms of cost and usability. The average users of these products only utilize/discover a small fraction of the overall capability – this is especially true for college undergrads and one-time users. The overhead of obtaining and installing the advanced toolsets is often a setback in productivity. People are overwhelmed, and people are lazy.

Off-the-shelf solutions for algorithm design and prototyping were not built with collaboration in mind. In certain situations a user must implement an already known algorithm to solve a larger/newer/more exciting problem. Traditional methods (in the scientific, non-software developer world) lack an explicit specification of code structure and code reusability.

Implementations of all type of algorithms do exist wildly on the internet. However, these implementations differ in quality as much as they differ in syntax (or programming language.) Serious (or desperate?) users usually consult programming forums on the quality of different implementations, and often suffer the process of porting an implementation from one programming language to another.

The Solution

Algorithmatic.com aims to be a platform that will unite all algorithm implementations under a single repository. User submissions can be edited as well as discussed and rated collaboratively. The wiki-nature of this approach should carry an incremental perfection to user implementations, starting a collaborative advancement in the way we think and design algorithms.

Algorithmatic, by itself, is a small and simple dynamically typed Object Oriented programming language that serves as a common denominator among popular programming languages. In other words, Algorithmatic follows a very familiar syntax and programming conventions making the learning curve non-existent for the average developer and sufficiently easy for a beginner.

More importantly, Algorithmatic was built for reusability and code structure. Namely, users’ implementations can find, call and execute other external algorithms submitted by other users, seamlessly and with minimum effort. This turns the process of experimenting and innovating new solutions into a breeze. (See Algorithmatic Object)

Algorithmatic.com provides an in-browser Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to develop and experiment with solutions. The mini-IDE currently supports:

• Syntax highlighting
• Real-time syntax validation
• Auto-completion object names, properties, and basic type inference; and
• Basic debugging through break-points, stack-trace, watch list, and immediate console

Who Owns This?

Implementations are volunteered by users to the public domain. (See Creative Commons)

Where to Start?

Have a look at the IDE. Then have a look at Algorithmatic Reference Manual or Beginners Guide. Experiment a little. If you like what you see, login using your OpenID and make something nice.

More Questions?

Send me an email (see footer), or use Feedback for suggestions/issues (which are always welcome). If you think it is a really good or important question, edit this wiki-page and it will be answered here.