Stephen Wolfram

One is Mathematica, the other is Wolfram Alpha.

So Mathematica first came out in 1988.

It's this system that is basically an instance of Wolfram language and it's used to do computations, particularly in sort of technical areas.

And the typical thing you're doing is you're typing little pieces of computational language and you're getting computations done.

It's very kind of, there's like a symbolic... Yeah, it's a symbolic language.

Right, so the point is that in a traditional programming language, the raw material of the programming language is just stuff that computers intrinsically do.

And the point of Wolfram language is that what the language is talking about is things that exist in the world or things that we can imagine and construct.

It's aimed to be an abstract language from the beginning.

And so, for example, one feature it has is that it's a symbolic language, which means that the thing called, you have an X, just type in X.

And Wolfman and I would just say, oh, that's X. It won't say error, undefined thing.

You know, I don't know what it is, computation, you know, in terms of the internals of the computer.

Now, that X could perfectly well be, you know, the city of Boston.

That's a thing.

That's a symbolic thing.

Or it could perfectly well be the, you know, the trajectory of some spacecraft represented as a symbolic thing.

And that idea that one can work with, sort of computationally work with these different, these kinds of things that exist in the world or describe the world, that's really powerful.

And that's what, I mean, you know, when I started designing, well, when I designed the predecessor of what's now Wolfram Language, which is a thing called SMP, which was my first computer language, I...

I kind of wanted to have this sort of infrastructure for computation which was as fundamental as possible.

I mean, this is what I got for having been a physicist and tried to find fundamental components of things and wound up with this kind of idea of transformation rules for symbolic expressions as being sort of the underlying stuff from which computation would be built.

And that's what we've been building in Wolfram Language.