This seems like they have essentially codified wolfram alpha's many APIs and created the biggest, baddest standard library any language has ever seen, and slapped on some functions to access everything with. It seems like the wolfram language essentially sits on abstraction level max-1 which is pretty amazing.
I wonder how things break down when you don't want to do something that can be perfectly described in existing functions (ex. you need to perform some novel computation on an intermediate result of some function). Though I'm sure people much smarter than myself have made sure the code is modular enough to allow you to get your hands dirty (or they written the code such that if you have to get your hands dirty, you're doing it wrong)
> This seems like they have essentially codified wolfram alpha's many APIs and created the biggest, baddest standard library any language has ever seen, and slapped on some functions to access everything with.
From my understanding, a big part of its intended usage is for interfacing from applications in other languages. So you can offload all of the difficult calculations from your C/Java/PHP program and get Wolfram to do the work.
I wonder how things break down when you don't want to do something that can be perfectly described in existing functions (ex. you need to perform some novel computation on an intermediate result of some function). Though I'm sure people much smarter than myself have made sure the code is modular enough to allow you to get your hands dirty (or they written the code such that if you have to get your hands dirty, you're doing it wrong)