Unlike Knuth, however, Wolfram erected his no-compromises system in an impressively short time while simultaneously putting together a company to support and market it. It's hardly a new idea to incorporate a programming language into an application program. But the language aspect of Mathematica strikes us as considerably more ambitious. It's even taught as a first language in some college programs. And yet you sell it as an application.
Programming languages are a surprisingly slow-moving field.
Fortran was invented before I was born and C is more than 20 years old now. It's kind of strange, in a world where computer hardware and the uses that computers are put to have advanced so rapidly, that programming languages have advanced so slowly. Once people have gotten used to using a programming language, you have to do an awful lot to convince them that they should switch to something else. We were lucky. People started off using Mathematica like an extremely enhanced calculator.