Stephen Wolfram Q&A
Submit a questionSome collected questions and answers by Stephen Wolfram
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January 1, 1993
From: Interview by Michael Swaine, Dr. Dobb's Journal
What does developing a programming language “for its own sake” mean?
If you ask yourself, “What are the languages that have a chance in the next century?” there aren’t very many of them. And I think that Mathematica has more than a chance. That means that we have an example of a language that has pretty modern ideas—it is certainly a big step beyond C and Fortran—and that is already widely used today. One of the things that I consider an exciting direction is to what extent we can expand the use of the language itself, independent of the application side of Mathematica. We’ve considered making a thing that will probably be called M, that is essentially Mathematica without the mathematics.