| > One reason is Wolfram is extremely talented at language design It's always a matter of taste when it comes to language design, but I'd have to disagree with this assessment ;-) > which is necessary to build an artifact of this size without self-immolating Well, that's certainly not the case. Plenty of huge software artifacts of very impressive quality have been built by non-language-designers. > Another is that it is a commercial company following a plan This is certainly true. Or rather, several plans, all of which intersect at common mathematical sub-questions. So then the entire company can leverage effort that's been poured into those components. > A third is that few people have learned the lessons of Mathematica enough to apply them Nah. I think the third reason is that Wolfram hires excellent hackers who are also excellent mathematicians. He hires a lot of them. And he puts them to work on the intersectional capabilities I mentioned above. (Disclaimer: pure conjecture. I've never worked at Wolfram) |