Thirty years is basically half the complete history of modern digital computing. The core concepts of the system remain as simple and clear as they ever were, though-so it’s still perfectly possible to capture them even in a small book. Today if we were to print out the online documentation it would take perhaps 36,000 pages. But as soon we could routinely expect network connectivity to central servers, we started building in earnest what’s now our immense knowledgebase of computable data about the real world.īack in 1988, I could document pretty much everything about Mathematica in the 750-page book I wrote. At the beginning the knowledge was mostly algorithmic, and formal. But in many cases it took building a whole tower of capabilities-over a large number of years-to be able to achieve what I wanted.įrom the very beginning-and even from projects of mine that preceded Mathematica-I had the goal of building as much knowledge as possible into the system. I recently found a to-do list I wrote in 1991-and I’m happy to say that now, in 2018, essentially everything on it has been successfully completed. (Here’s a plot of function count by version.) But the most important thing has been that-through the integrated design of our system-we’ve been able to progressively build on what we’ve already done to reach one new area after another, at an accelerating pace. And partly it’s been our ability to understand what could conceivably be done. Partly it’s been the growth of raw computer power that’s made new areas possible. But in subsequent years we were able to conquer area after area. And there were also all sorts of functions related to mathematical computation, as well as to things like basic visualization. The concept of “ superfunctions” that automate a swath of algorithmic capability already existed in 1988-but their capabilities pale in comparison to our modern superfunctions.īack in 1988 the core ideas of symbolic expressions and symbolic programming were already there, working essentially as they do today. And the expectations for each function have vastly increased too. There were 551 built-in functions in 1988 there are now more than 5100. And as one way to see this, here’s how the different major areas of functionality have “lit up” between 1988 and today: But it’s absolutely nothing compared to what Mathematica and the Wolfram Language can do today. It’s Grown So Muchīack in 1988, Mathematica was a big step forward in high-level computing, and people were amazed at how much it could do. But it’s nice to see that all that daily effort I’ve put into leadership and consistent language design has paid off so well in long-term stability over the course of 30 years. And without the strength and clarity of the original design it would never have been possible. Of course, it’s taken a lot of long-term discipline in language design to make this work. But what about the Mathematica code (or, as we would call it today, Wolfram Language code)? Well, the code that ran in 1988 just runs today, exactly the same! And, actually, I routinely take code I wrote at any time over the past 30 years and just run it. Yes, even in Version 1, there’s a recognizable Wolfram Notebook to be seen. It’s fun today to launch Mathematica 1.0 on an old computer, and compare it with today: And over the years we’ve been able to just keep building and building on what’s already there, to create a taller and taller tower of carefully integrated capabilities. My original core concepts of language design continue to infuse everything we do. It’s exciting to see how well it’s all worked out. But over the past 30 years, we’ve been able to build on the framework that we defined in Mathematica 1.0 to create the whole edifice of computational capabilities that we now call the Wolfram Language-and that corresponds to Mathematica as it is today.įrom when I first began to design Mathematica, my goal was to create a system that would stand the test of time, and would provide the foundation to fill out my vision for the future of computation. And we’ve kept pushing the frontiers of what’s possible with math. Our first big application area was math (hence the name “Mathematica”). Our mission has always been a big one: to make the world as computable as possible, and to add a layer of computational intelligence to everything. In fact, it feels in many ways like even after 30 years, we’re really just getting started. Most software from 30 years ago is now long gone. On June 23 we celebrate the 30th anniversary of the launch of Mathematica.
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