Find out Etienne’s initial predictions by visiting last week’s World Cup blog post. The World Cup is half-way through: the group phase is over, and the knockout phase is beginning. Let's update the winning probabilities for the remaining teams, and analyze how our classifier performed on the group-phase matches. From the 32 initial teams, 16 are qualified for the knockout phase:

Back in 2012, Jon McLoone wrote a program that analyzed the coding examples of over 500 programming languages that were compiled on the wiki site Rosetta Code. He compared the programming language of Mathematica (now officially named the Wolfram Language) to 14 of the most popular and relevant languages, and found that most programs can be written in the Wolfram Language with 1/2 to 1/10 as much code---even as tasks become larger and more complex. We were curious to see how the Wolfram Language continues to stack up, since a lot has happened in the last two years. So we updated and re-ran Jon's code, and, much to our excitement (though we really weren't all that surprised), the Wolfram Language remains largely superior by all accounts! Keep in mind that the programming tasks at Rosetta Code are the typical kinds of exercises that you can write in conventional programming languages: editing text, implementing quicksort, or solving the Towers of Hanoi. You wouldn’t even think of dashing off a program in C to do handwriting recognition, yet that’s a one-liner in the Wolfram Language. And since the Wolfram Language’s ultra-high-level constructs are designed to match the way people think about solving problems, writing programs in it is usually easier than in other languages. In spite of the Rosetta Code tasks being relatively low-level applications, the Wolfram Language still wins handily on code length compared to every other language. Here's the same graph as in Jon's 2012 post comparing the Wolfram Language to C. Each point gives the character counts of the same task programmed in the Wolfram Language and C. Notice the Wolfram Language still remains shorter for almost every task, staying mostly underneath the dashed one-to-one line: The same holds true for Python:

Touch Press recently announced its newest title, Incredible Numbers, by Ian Stewart. The rich interactive explorations in the ebook were prototyped in the Wolfram Language by Phil Ramsden, who is a Teaching Fellow at Imperial College London and a Mathematica trainer. We asked him to relate his experience here. Ian Stewart's mathematical imagination is boundless. There are few areas of the subject that haven't been illuminated, for a general readership, by his gift for clear and vivid exposition. So when Ian, Touch Press, and Profile Books decided to create something interactive, they needed a development and prototyping environment in which you can do pretty much anything; a mere specialist application wasn’t going to cut it. That's where the Wolfram Language came in and, happily for me, where I did too. The Wolfram Language provides an environment in which you can do pretty much anything, and do it quickly. The reason that the Wolfram Language is such a “game-changer” is that where interactive content is concerned, it takes us into a world where an idea (such as one of Ian’s) can become a working prototype in no time.