The Stephen Wolfram Podcast History of Science & Technology Q&A (December 10, 2025)
Dec 24, 2025
Dive into the intriguing evolution of languages and the Wolfram Language, where readability beat symbols in tech adoption. Explore how historical figures like Leibniz and Babbage shaped early computer science. Discover ancient civilizations' computational thinking, and ponder if linguistic change mirrors computational processes. The podcast examines whether American English preserves older British accents and how knowledge spread in antiquity, emphasizing personal connections over textbooks. A fascinating journey through the history of science and technology!
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Make Language Match Human Intuition
- Stephen Wolfram argues computational languages should map to familiar human terms to be usable.
- Notation alone (like APL glyphs) failed because people couldn't learn many new symbols.
SMP's Short Names Backfired
- Wolfram recounts designing SMP in 1979 and using very short command names because users typed slowly on dumb terminals.
- Short cryptic names made SMP code hard to read and confused users.
One Language For Many Domains
- Wolfram Language aims to be a coherent computational infrastructure covering many domains with uniform constructs.
- He prefers integration over separate dialects so domain objects interoperate (e.g., chemical graphs as graphs).