History of Science & Technology Q&A (August 21, 2024)

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history of science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Questions include: Recent thoughts on history - Was SMP or Mathematica inspired by LISP and what are the pros and cons of LISP-like languages? - Was the decision to have Mathematica untyped unlike something like Lean (proof checker) a good decision for usability or would you do it differently today? - Type-checking always felt like dimensional analysis. - Was your idea to use "transformations on symbolic expressions" a sudden insight after reading, say, Schönfinkel on combinators, or did it follow from working out atoms of computation, something else? - What is the history of lazy evaluation? - Have you come up with any new theories of human reasoning from working on Mathematica and computation?