Stephen Wolfram's Long Demo of the Wolfram Language

[mouser]

I am not a big fan of Stephen Wolfram -- I think his "A New Kind of Science" was a mess.

Likewise, I experience some real cringing listening to him describe his new 30-years-in-the-making "language" as being great at doing everything.  In fact I think from everything we've seen so far, I'm not sure "language" is the best description for what this is.  I have a deep skepticism for projects that try to make it super easy to do big complicated things -- because often they make it exceedingly difficult to actually write code that does what you want.

He looks like he's basically thrown everything including the kitchen sink into this -- it looks like a massive amount of work, and a massive amount of work to maintain -- which makes me skeptical about it's survival.

BUT whatever it is, there are some very cool things going on here.. And it looks like a wonderous thing to play with.  Well worth a watch:

[40hz]

Hoo boy! I'm not sure what to make of this one...

One thing for certain. It's not a programming language in the sense we usually use the term. It's more of an environment or framework. Sorta like Smalltalk and Lisp got wedded to EMACS, put on steroids, and then sent into the world with two lines of coke up its nose.

I see a couple of potential problems with some of the paradigms. And the vast lexicon it appears to have violates every principle of language design I was ever taught. But maybe with today's hardware (and the ubiquitous presence of the web) some of those design concepts need revisiting...

Yeah. I'm definitely going to be watching and playing with this one even though I'm somewhat sceptical about what its long-term prospects are going to be.

But like the saying goes: "Theory be damned. If it works - go for it."