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by bitwize
2604 days ago
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If John McCarthy had said this about Lisp in the 1950s or 1960s, it would have probably been preserved as a seminal paper, a computer-science classic. Lisp literally was the first language for reasoning about computation itself, and it was for decades the go-to language for experimenting with new computational concepts, abstractions, and applications. As it is, it's the usual sort of puffery we've come to expect from Wolfram, a few decades late. This is particularly mordantly ironic because Wolfram owes much of his success to Lisp (Mathematica being more or less a successor to Macsyma), despite having once been the shithead teenager who disparaged Lisp as too slow for real symbolic mathematical programming. (see: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/comp.lang.lisp/BU...) |
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'In this article, we first describe a formalism for defining functions recursively. We believe this formalism has advantages both as a programming language and as a vehicle for developing a theory of computation'
There is a lot of fluff in the Wolfram article:
'To be fair, the Wolfram Language is the sole example that exists of a full-scale computational language. But one gets a sense of magnitude from it. While 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—with many of those individually representing major pieces of computational intelligence. And in its effort to be able to talk about the real world, the Wolfram Language also has millions of entities of all sorts built into it. And, yes, the Wolfram Language has had more than three decades of energetic, continuous development put into it.'
Just like other attempts in making vast amounts of world knowledge available for computation. See for example Cyc of Cycorp.