I use Mathematica occasionally. I think it sucks[1] and I loathe it, but I sometimes find it useful for implementing mathematical algorithms and solvers before (or after) I implement them in production code, for prototyping (or debugging).
Regardless of how I feel about the technical aspects of Mathematica itself, wow, is Stephen Wolfram[2] a piece of work, or what? I have a healthy ego, and I think I'm a pretty smart guy, but my God, that man's ego burns with the light of a thousand suns. He's obviously very smart, and he's a very successful businessperson, but his level of egomaniacal self-promotion transcends any level of intelligence or success.
A group of friends and I used to do dramatic readings of the About the Author text from the Mathematica Book, which begins thusly:
About the Author
Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica and is widely regarded as the most important innovator in scientific and technical computing today.
The guy wrote that himself[3].
Wait, while searching for that, I see he updated it slightly in later versions:
About the Author
Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica, and a well-known scientist. He is widely regarded as the most important innovator in technical computing today, as well as one of the world's most original research scientists.
I guess the original didn't fully express the boundless expanse of his awesomeness.
But still, I never really thought much about posting this opinion publicly[4]; it just didn't seem worth it...until today.
As most of the internet knows, Wolfram launched Wolfram|Alpha a little while back. Cutting through the hype, it seems to be a project that's trying to take a lot of data and unify and tag it semantically with units and so forth, so computers can reason and compute about it. People have found, like with most of these knowledge representation attemps, if you stray very far from the examples, it doesn't work. But hey, it's cool that they're trying. I'm all for big and well-funded AI projects.
Given that it doesn't work very well, it becomes very useful for jokes, so as the punchline to a mail I was sending to some friends who were debating whether game designers should learn to program, I decided to ask Wolfram Alpha. This was its reply:
To me, this image is the knowledge-search-engine equivalent to the Warren-Spector-game-journalism quote. It's just beautiful along every axis.
Miscellaneous
- The most excellent Casey Muratori asks:
Does anyone want to bet as to which will gain self-awareness first: Wolfram Alpha or Wolfram, Stephen?
- Sadly, if you ask Wolfram|Alpha to compute the light of a thousand suns, you get nonsense.
- This is the image displayed when you click on Wolfram's intro screencast:
- ↑ I will write up why I think it sucks it in more detail at some point on my Mathematica page, but for now I refer you to this. To be fair, I'm using an old copy of Mathematica 3.0, but I've looked at the feature lists of the newer versions and they don't seem to fix (or even acknowledge) the issues I have with it, so I've never bothered to upgrade. I have an article brewing about my math problem solving workflow that I hope to post before the heat death of the universe.
- ↑ Read the talk page as well, of course.
- ↑ It just keeps getting better: if you Google the quote, Google helpfully suggests: Did you mean: Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematics and is widely regarded as the most important innovator in scientific and technical computing today. Um, no, I didn't, thanks.
- ↑ No, not even after A New Kind of Science came out.