Mathematica: what is symbolic programming?

Question

I am a big fan of Stephen Wolfram, but he is definitely one not shy of tooting his own horn. In many references, he extols Mathematica as a different symbolic programming p

Answer 1

Mathematica is using term rewriting heavily. The language provides special syntax for various forms of rewriting, special support for rules and strategies. The paradigm is not that "new" and of course it's not unique, but they're definitely on a bleeding edge of this "symbolic programming" thing, alongside with the other strong players such as Axiom.

As for comparison to Haskell, well, you could do rewriting there, with a bit of help from scrap your boilerplate library, but it's not nearly as easy as in a dynamically typed Mathematica.