I think Stephen is misrepresenting the Wolfram Language when he says it is a 
big language. He is really talking about the built in library which is indeed 
huge.  The language proper is actually simple, powerful, and lispy.
-David

On Sep 24, 2014, at 3:32 PM, Reuben Thomas <[email protected]> wrote:

> On 24 September 2014 23:20, Tim Olson <[email protected]> wrote:
> Interesting talk by Stephen Wolfram at the Strange Loop conference:
> 
>         https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjCWdsrVcBM
> 
> He goes in the direction of creating a “big” language, rather than a small 
> kernel that can be built upon, like Smalltalk, Maru, etc.
> 
> Smalltalk and Maru are rather different: Ian Piumarta would argue, I suspect, 
> that the distinction between "small" and "large" languages is an artificial 
> one imposed by most languages' inability to change their syntax. Smalltalk 
> can't, but Maru can. Here we see Ian making Maru understand Smalltalk, ASCII 
> state diagrams, and other things:
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGeN2IC7N0Q
> 
> That's the sort of small kernel you could build Wolfram on.
> 
> Racket is a production-quality example of the same thing: 
> http://racket-lang.org
> 
> -- 
> http://rrt.sc3d.org
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