I know Lisp and more specifically, Lisp machines, have greatly influenced Mathematica but when I read that Wolfram is using Mathematica as a computer shell I can't help but think that he's taken the Symbolics Genera paradigm and ran with it. I'm certainly happy about that since nobody else seems to have realized how well it fits in with the current era of having to deal with ever-increasing information flows in disparate domains.

But I'm also regretting that Mathematica is not opensource since I'm convinced this constitutes a great barrier that the vast majority of programmers today will not attempt to cross.