Stephen Wolfram

And so you'll say, we're doing that.

I mean, it's a pretty cool thing, actually.

You know, say this is the code and, you know, here are a bunch of examples of running the code.

Okay, people will at least look at those and they'll say that example is wrong.

And then it'll kind of wind back from there.

And I agree that the kind of the intermediate level of people reading the computational language code, in some case, people will do that.

In other case, people just look at the tests.

Or even just look at the results.

And sometimes it'll be obvious that you got the thing you wanted to get because you were just describing, you know, make me this interface that has two sliders here.

And you can see it has those two sliders there.

And that's the result you want.

But I think one of the questions then is, in that setting where you have this kind of ability, broad ability of people to access computation, what should people learn?

In other words, right now, you go to computer science school, so to speak, and a large part of what people end up learning, I mean, it's been a funny historical development because back 30, 40 years ago, computer science departments were quite small, and they taught things like finite automata theory and compiler theory and things like this.

A company like mine rarely hired people who'd come out of those programs because the stuff they knew was, I think, is very interesting.

I love that theoretical stuff.

But, you know, it wasn't that useful for the things we actually had to build in software engineering.

And then kind of there was this big pivot in the 90s, I guess, where there was a big demand for sort of IT type programming and so on and software engineering.

And then, you know, big demand from students and so on.

You know, we want to learn this stuff.

And I think the thing that really was happening in part was lots of different fields of human endeavor were becoming computational.