Via Chris Granade, I learned we now have an actual implementation of Wolfram Language to play around with. Wolfram lauds the Wolfram Programming Cloud, the first product based on the Wolfram Language:

My goal with the Wolfram Language in general—and Wolfram Programming Cloud in particular—is to redefine the process of programming, and to automate as much as possible, so that once a human can express what they want to do with sufficient clarity, all the details of how it is done should be handled automatically. [my emphasis]

Ah. You mean, like programming?

Wolfram’s example of the Wolfram Programming Cloud is “a piece of code that takes text, figures out what language it’s in, then shows an image based on the flag of the largest country where it’s spoken.” The demo shows how the WPC maps the string good afternoon to the English language, the United States and thence to the modern US flag.

English is an official language of India, which exceeds the US in population size, and of Canada, which exceeds the US in total enclosed area.

The Wolfram Language documentation indicates that “LargestCountry” means “place with most speakers”; by this standard, the US comes out on top (roughly 300 million speakers, versus 125 million for India and 28 million for Canada). But that’s not the problem we were supposed to solve: “place with most speakers” is not the same as “largest country where the language is spoken.”

Even the programming languages which are sold as doing what you mean still just do what you say.