Mathematica has long been a pretty unique achievement. The notebook interface, the symbolic power, and the polished consistency of it all. Due to being closed-source, I've somewhat ignored their evolution, and you need some tolerance to S.W.'s self-aggrandizing tone 😉. Yet they're definitely doing some very FoC work, and this essay proposes an angle I haven't heard before:
So for example, a computational language can intrinsically talk about things in the real world—like the planet Mars or New York City or a chocolate chip cookie . A programming language can intrinsically talk only about abstract data structures in a computer.
📝 What We’ve Built Is a Computational Language (and That’s Very Important!)—Stephen Wolfram Writings
Is the Wolfram Language a computer programming language? Stephen Wolfram explains why it is, rather, a computational language--a way to communicate computational ideas.
In this essay, Wolfram says that "[w]hile the core of a standard programming language typically has perhaps a few tens of primitive functions built in, the Wolfram Language has more than 5600"
Now, how does this compare to the number of functions in say Python's standard library, or in C++ STL and boost, or in Java's EE libraries, or in JavaScript's standard libraries? Does anyone have a rough idea on the numbers?
Lots of interesting ideas in this piece. I was confused about what makes the language computational, and it helped me to think of it as a language in an environment. Which includes the built-in functions, all the data definitions that come with, etc.
It does make me think of the promise and tragedy of the semantic web and Wikidata, which feels like it could offer a foundation for an open version of something like this.
It feels, from this outsider's perspective, like it hasn't really loved up to its potential?
I heard that argument made about the Semantic Web, but not about Wikidata specifically. What do you think is the potential of Wikidata it didn't live up to?
