Stephen Wolfram's Introduction to the Wolfram Language
I’m impressed. Beyond being just a grab-bag of libraries (which it could have been) it seems there’s real thinking about composability here. The laziness of evaluation, the “symbolic-ness” makes it a powerful functional programming language. In fact, it’s almost a “data-flow” language. Of the kind, like Yahoo Pipes, which can become an orchestrator of web-level components.
That already gives some substance to the claim that this is a “new” kind of programming. But what REALLY differentiates it, I think, is the philosophical commitment to what O’Reilly used to call “Data Inside“.
This might well herald a new trend : “programming language as a service”. A language whose essence and value depends on not just the library of functionality, but the continuously updated data living in that cloud. This is genuinely new. (Maybe it contrasts with something I once said about SemanticCommitment, that semantic constraints weren’t the treasure that the SemWeb people thought they might be. Perhaps the Wolfram Language is a bet against me, and on the idea that we now have comprehensive enough databases of “knowledge” about the world, that packaging huge ontologies of semantics within languages is a valued feature.)
It’s also a huge risk to the programmer, of course. You’ll only EVER run Wolfram Language against Wolfram’s cloud. Every program you write will be dependent on Wolfram in perpetuity. And we know where that story leads … the cloud provider’s business model inevitably evolves to being observation and analysis of what the customer is doing. (And it should go without saying that every program you run is explicitly open to inspection by the NSA etc.) But some people will be willing to make that trade-off.