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Chris 2023-08-29 21:31:48

Fascinating video that popped up on my radar today of Stephen Wolfram demoing Mathematica in 1989 youtu.be/MeuCAT5HDh0?si=mZHZtW1YmDmH4aRT

I was quite blown away by how powerful and ahead of its time it was, even back then, with features like interactive programming in a very high level, multi-paradigm language for symbolic computation with rich, introspectable outputs and various thoughtful design decisions around interoperability, extensibility and API (as validated by how none of the API functions demo'd have changed AFAIK in 30+ years!)

🎥 Introducing Mathematica, Stephen Wolfram

Introducing Mathematica, Stephen Wolfram

Konrad Hinsen 2023-08-30 09:05:20

Mathematica has indeed an excellent track record for API stability. Wolfram had been doing computer algebra in Lisp before, so he was familiar with interactive high-level programming. But bringing this to a much wider market remains a remarkable achievement.

Chris 2023-08-30 17:12:57

Wolfram had been doing computer algebra in Lisp before, so he was familiar with interactive high-level programming. But bringing this to a much wider market remains a remarkable achievement

Good point and he had also cut his teeth on SMP after that, which apparently Rob Pike convinced him to write in C instead of Lisp and I'm sure that helped with performance and portability

Andreas S. 2023-08-30 16:17:56

github.com/Ruddle/Fomos „So what if an app was a function ? „

Daniel Buckmaster 2023-08-30 21:41:09

Passing a "context" into the main function immediately makes me think of capability-based security. Indeed they gesture in that direction in the example of instrumenting allocation for a specific app.

Jimmy Miller 2023-08-31 03:05:15

Yeah I really enjoyed this write up. Such an interesting approach to an os design. I’d love to see us explore more os design not just from the user level, but at this sort of technical level as well.

The ability to debug and introspect by wrapping context is wonderful.

Shubhadeep Roychowdhury 2023-08-31 03:28:47

I also looked into it yesterday. Found it refreshing and very interesting. I am planning to follow the development of this one.

Andreas S. 2023-09-01 10:30:08

I couldn't resist and ask Paul chuisano about it because I felt remindet on that: pchiusano.github.io/2013-05-22/future-of-software.html