Is Wolfram Language a true programming language? [closed]

Question

Closed. This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers.

---

Want to improve this question? Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by editing this post.

Closed 5 years ago.

Wolfram is about to release its "knowledge based programming language" but is it really a true programming language in the same way as C#, Java etc?

To avoid this being too subjective, I'll clarify that by "true programming language" I mean: is it Turing complete?

Answer 1

What qualifies as "true" for you? Do you mean Turing complete?

see From this answer

In general, for an imperative language to be Turing-complete, it needs:

A form of conditional repetition or conditional jump (e.g., while, if+goto)

A way to read and write some form of storage (e.g., variables, tape)

In Venture Beat's coverage of Wolfram's announcement of the language they write:

In other words, “South America” is not a variable to be assigned, or an object or class to be instantiated. It’s a phrase that is known and understood, with significance and meaning and connections that can be pulled into your program with very little effort, and no external data sources. And, that knowledge source is continually updating and growing to match the updating and changing world.

Source

Which makes it sound as if the focus of the language is on the Wolfram Database and various ways of manipulating this data.

Wolfram himself further says of the language

“The level of automation is incredibly higher than people could ever have before – it’s incredibly powerful,” Wolfram says. “Anything that WolframAlpha knows, your app knows.”

Source

Which once again sounds like what we're looking at is a scripting language aimed at harnessing Wolfram Alpha's combination of data + search algorithms.