I love this, too many people keep themselves busy discussing bits and bytes, or Stephen Wolfram's personality.

The reality is that by now we should already be at a level where common programming would be like Wolfram everywhere.

Maybe agents and LLM driven code generation is how we eventually get into the next abstraction level, sadly won't be without casualties with smaller team sizes, when so much can be automated away.

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creata 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The reality is that by now we should already be at a level where common programming would be like Wolfram everywhere.

What aspects of the Wolfram language should be everywhere? The easy access to lots of datasets? The easy access to lots of mathematical functions? CAS in general?

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pjmlp 6 hours ago | parent [-]

All of those, plus having an interactive graphical environment, debugging experience and optimisation when needed.

Basically the ideas of Smalltalk and Lisp Machine variations, that are still only partially available in modern IDEs, and proudly ignored by the "vt100 rules and vi first" minded devs.

	▲	TheTaytay 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes! Reminds me of the “Stop writing Dead Programs” talk. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33270235

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wasmainiac 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Hi Stephen, is that you?

Jokes and sales pitches aside. We kinda have that already, we platforms that allow us to run the same code on, x86, arm, wasm… and so on. It’s just there is no consensus on which platform to use. Nor should there be since that would slow progress of new and better ways to program.

We will never have one language to span graphics, full stack, embedded, scientific, high performance, etc without excessive bloat.

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pjmlp 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Many VCs today would vouch that would be agentic AI.

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wasmainiac 3 hours ago | parent [-]

No. I work in VC backed startups. Externally they might say that for investors, but talk to a software engineer. Agentic IA is not working, it will regurgitate code from examples online, but if you get it to do something complex or slightly novel, it falls flat on its face.

Maybe it will someday be good enough, but not today, and probably not for at least 5 years.

	▲	pjmlp an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Meanwhile there are people delivering solutions in iPaaS tools, which is quite far from the traditional programming that gets discussed on HN. Some of those tools aren't yet fully there, but also aren't completely dumb, they get more done in a day, than trying to do the same workflows with classical programming. Workato, Boomi, Powerapps, Opal,...