Starting to Demo the Wolfram Language [video]

"One of the things that I consider an exciting direction is to what extent we can expand the use of the language itself, independent of the application side of Mathematica. We've considered making a thing that will probably be called M, that is essentially Mathematica without the mathematics."

http://www.stephenwolfram.com/media/stephen-wolfram-multipar...

What's funny is that it's only the "without the mathematics" part that hasn't necessarily come true, except possibly in terms of marketing. This little Raspberry Pi below my desk has a "Wolfram Language" distribution on it, which as far as I can tell is exactly the same as Mathematica.

Second, I keep seeing videos and articles about Wolfram Alpha and am always left scratching my head kinda going "WTF?"

So it's a knowledge-based purely symbolic programming language? Can it play Flappy Bird? Power the next cool startup? Give me an answer to a question I might have today? I've been to alpha a couple of times. Never seemed to be able to get the questions right to get the answers I wanted.

I don't mean that to be negative. My point is that any audience is going to have a thousand different needs and viewpoints, most of which will probably seem trivial to Stephen Wolfram. Most new technologies get past this hurdle by open-sourcing. That way there's a thousand experiments, and over time a few of them are bound to give all of us little nerds a gleam in our eye one way or the other.

The other way of doing this, where you have a single point of creation describing to the world how cool it is? It is limited to things that have a single terrific property that everybody can agree on.

I'm not sure that is the case here. Still -- awesome stuff. Can't wait to watch this evolve.

One aspect I think Mathematica will excel in is code generation. Using symbolic constructs in a very high level language to generate constructs of a low-level language is much easier to do in Mathematica than basically any other language.

On a side note - Linus Torvalds thought naming his operating system "Linux" was too arrogant. I think it's pretty bad marketing to name your programming language after yourself, but then again, the same social conventions that apply to us regular human beings certainly don't apply to Stephen Wolfram.

Want to see a lot more eyeballs on this and people playing with it. Hope Wolfram doesn't let "licensing fever" get in the way of the community understanding it fully.

Side note: The use of "I" and "My" really irks me. I imagine many, many people made this happen and contributed to these design goals. I guess this shouldn't take away from how cool this technology is, but it definitely leaves a bad taste in my mouth.