Review: Celebrating a Third of a Century of Mathematica

I've spent most of my professional life in computers, mathematics, and computer algebra. (Disclaimer, I'm the lead maintainer on Axiom, developed by a team at IBM Research, that I maintain as an open source computer algebra system so I'm not a disinterested party. That said, I'm certainly qualified in the subject area.) I've listened to Wolfram's "Celebrating a Third of a Century of Mathematica". It starts out with a walk through history, backwards, not forward. It's not a well-connected story. It involves a lot of unconnected references. It seems to ignore a lot of prior work, including work in computational physics, like Reduce. He seems to claim that Mathematica is the essential language of human thinking. Then he seems to turn to a "word salad" of words like "multi-computation". Despite replaying this section I have no idea what he's talking about. Finally he seems to claim Mathematica as the central pillar of the future. "... the core Wolfram Language that is intended to last forever." "We are building things which inexorably will be the way that people think about things."... "This idea of computational language... there isn't really a question about whether that's going to be the way that everybody ends up thinking about things in terms in terms of the computational paradigm" "The question of 'What will we see as we build the tower'... the things that are inexorable, there are things where we are just working through. We are getting this bigger and bigger area that are covering these bigger and bigger areas of knowledge. We have bitten into pretty much every conceivable area that we are now just 'chewing further', so to speak, to get all the pieces" There seems to be a theme of "the tower", rooted in the Wolfram Language that is a base for building intellectual development within this century. A tower of Babel if you will. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Stephen, than are dreamt of in your philosophy"