Programming Throwdown, Episode 86, Wolfram Language with Stephen Wolfram.

Take it away, Jason. Hey everyone, happy new year. Welcome

back. And we are starting the year off with an amazing interview. You know, very rarely do we get

the opportunity to interview someone who actually invented a language. Every show we always talk

about a language. And here we have Stephen Wolfram on the show.

And Stephen, why don't you kind of describe yourself and Wolfram research and kind of walk us

through your journey? Oh boy. Okay. This is a describe yourself in a few words. I remember,

I could tell you some interesting stories about times when people

have said that to me. But all right. Well, we have an hour. So you have plenty of words. Well,

let's see. For the last 32 years, I've been working on what's now Wolfram Language. And a couple

of things that many people will know about have come out of that.

One is Mathematica, which was first released in 1988, so we just had our 30th anniversary.

And the other is Wolfram Alpha, which came out in 2009.

And those are, Wolfram Language is kind of the core of those things.

I kind of started working, well, gosh, let's see.

What's the story?

Well, I got really interested in physics when I was about 10 or 11 years old,

which is a depressingly long time ago now.

That's beginning of the 1970s.

And one of the things about doing physics is you have to calculate all kinds of things with math and so on.

And I was very enthusiastic about physics and very unenthusiastic about

calculating things with math and so on and so I kind of I said this is really boring and

...