The language in itself is mildly interesting, since it's based on term rewriting. The closest language implementation in open source is "Pure" (http://purelang

The language in itself is mildly interesting, since it's based on term rewriting. The closest language implementation in open source is "Pure" (http://purelang.bitbucket.org/ http://purelang.bitbucket.org/), which I personally find superior in many respects. Term rewriting is an interesting topic, but it's not a deal-breaker as wolfram is trying to convey. We have many alternatives nowdays. The perhaps non-obvious limit is that the ordering of the rules plays a central role in term rewriting (as it does in it's close cousin: pattern matching), which makes it "cumbersome" (or quirky) to extend in a truly modular way.