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by echoes 4288 days ago
Ahh! I went to his SXSW talk this year and was absolutely entranced with the Wolfram language. It seemed like a real step forward in innovative thinking and actual "natural language" programming, but I was sad it's proprietary.

I think the power of it is really undervalued - using all the knowledge of the wolfram-alpha engine to create objects? Such a neat idea! Imagine if Google built a similar language based on their search engine data - the kinds of programs people could build and might accidentally build just playing around boggle the mind.
2 comments
taliesinb 4288 days ago
In some sense it is surprising that Google hasn't done this already. After all, Mozilla has seen fit to work on Rust, which will soon replace C++ (god willing). But if you're organizing the world's information, don't you need a programming language that can work with that information in a first-class way?
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pjmlp 4287 days ago
> which will soon replace C++

In what sense? If you mean traditional business software, maybe.

If you mean real systems programming, OS drivers and such, only when an OS vendor integrates it into their SDK.

That is how C and later on C++, pushed away all the other alternatives for systems programming.

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pjmlp 4287 days ago
We had it already, but the world wasn't prepared for it.

I experienced the same feeling when I got to work in Smalltalk back in 1996 and a few years ago started gathering information about Lisp machines and the systems developed at Xerox PARC.

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