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.

March 4, 2019

From: Reddit AMA

What do you feel about complexity after 30 years of developing a system?

This is a confusing question for me, because I’ve worked a lot on complexity in science (and the launching of “complexity theory” back in the early 1980s etc.) But I’m guessing you mean: complexity of a software system.

It’s very important that Wolfram Language is based on a small number of powerful principles (e.g. “everything is a symbolic expression”). It’s a lot of work to keep everything coherent, and aligned with the principles, and that’s a big part of how I’ve spent my past 30 years. But by keeping that coherence one builds something extremely powerful… where all the pieces fit together (connect image computation to graph theory to…). It’s what’s allowed us to continually accelerate the development of WL.

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