I love computer languages. In fact, I've spent roughly half my life nurturing one particular very rich computer language: Mathematica. But do we really need computer languages to tell our computers what to do? Why can't we just use natural human languages, like English, instead? If you'd asked me a few years ago, I would have said it was hopeless. That perhaps one could make toy examples, but that ultimately natural language just wouldn't be up to the task of creating useful programs. But then along came Wolfram|Alpha. In which we've been able to make free-form linguistics work vastly better than I ever thought possible. But still, in Wolfram|Alpha the input is essentially just set up to request knowledge---and Wolfram|Alpha responds by computing and presenting whatever knowledge is requested. But programming is different. It is not about generating static knowledge, but about generating programs that can take a range of inputs, and dynamically perform operations. So the first question is: how might we represent these programs?

With the release of Mathematica 8 today, the single most dramatic change is that you don't have to communicate with Mathematica in the Mathematica language any more: you can just use free-form English instead. Wolfram|Alpha has pioneered the concept of specifying computations with free-form linguistic input. And with Mathematica 8, the powerful methods of Wolfram|Alpha become available within the Mathematica environment. All one has to do is to type an = at the beginning of a line. Then what follows is taken as free-form linguistic input. You don't have to use precise Mathematica syntax. You can type things in just the way you think about them, in free-form English. But what happens is that Mathematica calls on Wolfram|Alpha to try to interpret your input, and turn it into precise Mathematica code.

Continuing with tradition, Wolfram Research Founder and CEO Stephen Wolfram kicked off last month's Wolfram Technology Conference 2010 by highlighting the year's top developments and sharing insights on new directions for Wolfram technologies. This year's conference keynote featured the unveiling of the forthcoming Mathematica 8, a demonstration of its powerful new functionality, and future opportunities for Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha. In the first part of this series, Stephen talked about Mathematica's "unstoppable momentum" and announced some of the new features coming in Mathematica 8.