Wikilambda the ultimate: the Wikimedia foundation’s search for the perfect language

Abstract In (Vrande 2020), the Wikimedia foundation launched its first new project in nearly a decade. The new project consists of two main parts: (1) Wikifunctions, a library of programming functions; and (2) Abstract Wikipedia, a language-agnostic Wikipedia that will be dynamically translated into the reader’s native tongue. Lying beneath both Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia is a new system called Wikilambda, which can execute code in potentially any programming language, providing a massively flexible computing service drawing on Wikifunctions and powering Abstract Wikipedia. The entire system is designed to address a fundamental bias in Wikipedia, namely its bias towards majority languages such as English and Spanish. In this paper, I present Wikilambda as an audacious attempt to realise a ‘perfect language’, as theorised by Umberto Eco (The Search for the Perfect Language. Making of Europe. Oxford, UK Eco U (1995) The search for the perfect language. Oxford, Cambridge, Mass., USA: Blackwell) Wikilambda provides a way of specifying functions that is supposed to transcend any particular ‘native’ language. In this way, it provides editors of Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia with a way of contributing to the overall system no matter which ‘native’ programming languages they know. More broadly, Wikilambda aims to achieve the ‘democratization of programming’, by enabling any person to use any function without needing to know English or a particular programming language (Vrandečić 2021). To analyse the technical and ideological aspects of Wikilambda, I apply the techniques of Critical Code Studies (Marino in Critical Code Studies, The MIT Press, Marino MC 2020) Critical code studies. The MIT Press, Cambridge. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12122.001.0001 ) to ‘the orchestrator’, the JavaScript application that instantiates Wikilambda’s new functional programming language. In the absence of a formal specification of the language, the Abstract Wikipedia team has gradually hacked Wikilambda out of JavaScript, leaving a fascinating public record of their attempt to realise their vision for a universal programming system.