[zitterbewegung]

The wolfram language is at its core is M-expressions (what John McCarthy originally was going to use to program lisp ) . Also, he saw that symbolic programming languages were something you could productize and he beat out all the lisp machines and kept it as software. He seized the opportunity of making a product that is useful to Mathematicians and basically has a huge vendor lock in from universities. Sage is very far behind as an open source solution.

With the wolfram language he wants to make a larger and larger libraries and try to make it more of a general purpose language but it has similar problems that lisp has but also that it’s really only targeting academia. I tried to use the cloud version but it never was really useful.

With wolfram alpha it was interesting to use but now Google can perform most of what that does now

The biggest problem with the language is that it’s extremely hard to learn and mathematicians are moving off of the platform.

[User23]

Yeah, Mathematica is basically MACSYMA on steroids. Wolfram is indubitably a genius, and he took it far past what the general research community and even the Lisp research community did. But I can't blame him for choosing to become a billionaire rather than a vulnerable and derided eccentric like RMS. I hope he chooses to share his work after his death.

[zitterbewegung]

I totally agree . Mathematica is not just macsyma on steroids its like the Java of symbolic computation. He is literally putting every kind of scientific and or mathematic concept and adding it to the language.