AFAICT, it's a confusingly aggrandizing term that does offer some new things, but should at most be considered a new subtype of programming language (rather than something different from programming languages altogether[0]—and I'd bet "new subtype" isn't even necessary). He mostly characterizes 'programming language' (as distinct from 'computational language') as telling the computer what to do, as if all previous programming languages were low-level imperative languages:
> With standard programming languages, we’ve had a way to talk about the low-level operation of computers. But with computational language, we now have a way to apply the computational paradigm directly to almost anything: we have a language and a notation for doing computational X, for basically any field “X” (from archaeology to zoology, and beyond).
From what I can tell, what actually characterizes his language is:
- It's pretty thoroughly declarative
- It offers nice ways of incorporating diverse data inputs/outputs into source code
- It seems to incorporate some very abstract notion of an entity that can be involved in a generic symbolic computation process, and maybe a way of defining collections of related entities (i.e. new 'domains')
- It seems unafraid of 'pluralism,' i.e. walking away from the elegance/mathiness of the previous item, and incorporating an encyclopedia-like collection of custom 'domains' into the language.
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[0] He pretty clearly contradicts himself on whether it's actually a programming language or not. He knows he's not going to get away with saying that it's not technically a programming language, but then... also wants to insist that the term isn't adequate to describe it:
> Yes, it’s a computer language—a programming language. And it does—in a uniquely productive way, I might add—what standard programming languages do. But that’s only a very small part of the story. And what I’ve finally come to realize is that one should actually think of the Wolfram Language as an entirely different—and new—kind of thing: what one can call a computational language.
> With standard programming languages, we’ve had a way to talk about the low-level operation of computers. But with computational language, we now have a way to apply the computational paradigm directly to almost anything: we have a language and a notation for doing computational X, for basically any field “X” (from archaeology to zoology, and beyond).
From what I can tell, what actually characterizes his language is:
- It's pretty thoroughly declarative
- It offers nice ways of incorporating diverse data inputs/outputs into source code
- It seems to incorporate some very abstract notion of an entity that can be involved in a generic symbolic computation process, and maybe a way of defining collections of related entities (i.e. new 'domains')
- It seems unafraid of 'pluralism,' i.e. walking away from the elegance/mathiness of the previous item, and incorporating an encyclopedia-like collection of custom 'domains' into the language.
----
[0] He pretty clearly contradicts himself on whether it's actually a programming language or not. He knows he's not going to get away with saying that it's not technically a programming language, but then... also wants to insist that the term isn't adequate to describe it:
> Yes, it’s a computer language—a programming language. And it does—in a uniquely productive way, I might add—what standard programming languages do. But that’s only a very small part of the story. And what I’ve finally come to realize is that one should actually think of the Wolfram Language as an entirely different—and new—kind of thing: what one can call a computational language.