Wolfram argued that, early on, the language saved its adopters from their darkest fear: “That they would always delegate the process of computation to somebody who would be down in the dungeon somewhere actually dealing with the computer.

“The big transformative thing that happened as a result of the release of Mathematica — and it happened rather quickly — was that people like theoretical physicists, mathematicians, things like this … Those kinds of people, were able to go from thinking of a computation to actually doing a computation directly, and were able to, therefore, get much further in lots and lots of different areas.

“And it’s been wonderful over the last third of a century to see all the inventions and discoveries that have been made using the technology that we built.”