Stephen Wolfram Q&A

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Some collected questions and answers by Stephen Wolfram

Questions may be edited for brevity; see links for full questions.

January 1, 1993

From: Interview by Michael Swaine, Dr. Dobb's Journal

You’ve considered “making a thing that will probably be called M, that is essentially Mathematica without the mathematics”. But how seriously?

We’ve built little Ms. There is no doubt that Mathematica without the mathematics will exist one day. The main issue for us is to figure out how it makes sense to distribute the thing. Right now there are particular application areas where people have written programs in Mathematica that don’t use the mathematical side of Mathematica, and those are the places where you start. But I believe that every application program should have a language underneath it, and it would be great if that language was a modern, highly capable language, not an imitation of Basic or some specially crafted language that just does things for databases, for example. That’s the niche I’m interested in seeing the Mathematica language go into in the future.

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