> A big early decision was what language SMP should be written in. Macsyma was written in LISP, and lots of people said LISP was the only possibility. But a you

> A big early decision was what language SMP should be written in. Macsyma was written in LISP, and lots of people said LISP was the only possibility. But a young physics graduate student named Rob Pike convinced me that C was the “language of the future”, and the right choice. (Rob went on to do all sorts of things, like invent the Go language.) And so it was that early in 1980, the first lines of C code for SMP were written. So Wolfram appears to be saying that C, the "language of the future", was much better than that old Lispy stuff he had been using. But then he goes on to admit that he spent lots of time reinventing features that are obvious in Lisp: >It got even weirder when one started dealing with multi-argument functions. It was quite nice that one could define a matrix with m:{{a,b},{c,d}}, then m[1] would be {a,b}, and either m[1,1] or m[1][1] would be a. But what if one had a function with several arguments? Would f[x, y] be the same as f[x][y]? Well, sometimes one wanted it that way, and sometimes not. So I had to come up with a property (“attribute” in Mathematica)—that I called Tier—to say for every function which way it should work. (Today more people might have heard of “currying”, but in those days this kind of distinction was really obscure.) Really obscure? To who? C programmers?