The Wolfram Language is quite cool. Sure, it's a shame it's proprietary - but it has a lot to offer, a few neat ideas, and makes for great, visual demos such as

The Wolfram Language is quite cool. Sure, it's a shame it's proprietary - but it has a lot to offer, a few neat ideas, and makes for great, visual demos such as the ones featured in that talk. The fact that you can get cool things running in a few lines of code, like the 3D stack of edges, is appealing - I don't think there are many languages out there that allow you to do things like this in a few lines of code, and with such flexibility. (it is quite a shame that Wolfram always has to assert how great they are, how revolutionary it is, how they invented everything, how unlike anything else ever done before their work is. It's off putting. Let your work speak for itself, and leave the meta comments out. But I digress.) I like the "tweet a program" concept. One issue with kids growing up mostly on mobile phones is that it makes them less likely to try to see what's inside and program it themselves. One solution some have attempted is to have IDEs directly running on tablets/phones, but those tend to be fairly clunky. Allowing people to experiment with computation in unconventional manners, e.g. over Twitter, strikes me as an interesting path. I had a similar project a couple years ago where you would tweet concise instructions to a bot that ran them into a virtual machine, for which the output was a 32x32 pixel image buffer and would get tweeted back to you. If you've played with forth salon or shadertoy, it's the same idea but with a language optimized so as to get cool results in <140 characters. Sadly, like many of my other bots, Twitter shut it down. But yeah, given their aspirations for education etc., some open source components would be nice. It strikes me as a great exploratory/prototyping language, although it'd probably be hard to maintain large codebases of it due to the fuzziness of the instructions and a certain opacity in the backend. All that being said, the tail end of the talk (about immortality and the singularity and the box of trillion souls - basically, when the paragraphs don't have code examples anymore) does fall into the standard techno-religious singularity crackpot speculation where things sound vaguely scientific - just enough to give them an air of credibility - but where the terms used are fuzzy and slippery enough to be manipulated into whatever direction the speaker wishes while maintaining an illusion of rigorous reasoning.