[dang]

Yes, I know about Wolfram's asides, tics, and shoehorning, as does everyone who reads a thing he wrote. But the Wolfram Derangement Syndrome it provokes in internet forum threads isn't interesting either. It's a mirror image of the thing it is annoyed by.

We're not going to ban what Wolfram writes because (a) he's a good writer, (b) however one evaluates him, Mathematica is significant, and (c) his best pieces—which this is one of—are interesting. That's enough to belong here, and I think we can expect HN to have the discipline to focus on the substantive bits and resist the hypnotic pull of the trollish ones.

[p4wnc6]

Who is talking about banning what he writes?

[Create]

Mathematica is significant

Mathematica is a proprietary software influenced by the earlier computer algebra systems Macsyma (of which Wolfram was a user) and Schoonschip (whose code Wolfram studied).

Maxima is a computer algebra system based on a 1982 version of Macsyma. It is written in Common Lisp and runs on all POSIX platforms such as OS X, Unix, BSD, and Linux as well as under Microsoft Windows and Android. It is free software released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

It would be the same to defend William Henry "Bill" Gates III, by stating that MS-DOS is significant, while MS-DOS was a renamed form of 86-DOS - owned by Seattle Computer Products, written by Tim Paterson. Development of 86-DOS took only six weeks, as it was basically a clone of Digital Research's CP/M (for 8080/Z80 processors), ported to run on 8086 processor.

[coldtea]

>Mathematica is a proprietary software

Nothing wrong with that.

>influenced by the earlier computer algebra systems Macsyma (of which Wolfram was a user) and Schoonschip (whose code Wolfram studied).

Not much wrong with that either.

Even if it was just a clone of those systems when it came out, being the successful clone is enough to make it have merit.

But of course since then it's 1000 times the code size of the initial systems, and 100 times the capabilities.

>It would be the same to defend William Henry "Bill" Gates III, by stating that MS-DOS is significant, while MS-DOS was a renamed form of 86-DOS

Again, MS-DOS is significant. Whether it was innovative (it wasn't) is another thing, but it sure has been historically significant.

Sorry, but it's not always the first product that comes out that defines an era and a market. And copying happens all the time too, and can even evolve into something that the original never was.

[Chris2048]

It may be that if the clone didn't exist, the attention might have instead fallen upon it's predecessors, with the benefit of them being non-propriety. Being a successful clone does not imply merit, in fact "forks" can do damage...

[jordigh]

> Nothing wrong with that.

Much wrong with that. Mathematics should not proceed based on a secret sauce. In mathematics, the details of the computation are almost always far more interesting than the result. The details are the very raison d'être of the subject.

[coldtea]

>Mathematics should not proceed based on a secret sauce.

Thanks god Mathematica is not mathematics the science, then, but just a tool in assisting with doing math and physics and all kinds of calculations.

>*In mathematics, the details of the computation are almost always far more interesting than the result.

Yeah, just not in any case Mathematica, Maple, R, Matlab etc were involved.

[Create]

The issue is misattributions and misappropriations. And those should be (and are) wrong, esp. in science.

Taking the spirit of the times, ie. migrating software from minis to micros/pc^1-s in both cases and expropriating and monopolizing is not about simply copying, nor evolution in the best sense.

^1 https://xkcd.com/386/

[scholia]

(1) "There Was a Time before Mathematica…"

Wolfram's blog post says he discovered "a program called Macsyma — that did algebra, and could be used interactively. I was amazed so few people used it. But it wasn’t long before I was spending most of my days on it."

Later: "I got more and more ambitious, trying to do more and more with Macsyma. Pretty soon I think I was its largest user. But sometime in 1979 I hit the edge; I’d outgrown it."

Later: "And after a little while I decided that the only way I’d really have a chance to get what I wanted was if I built it myself. And so it was that I embarked on what would become SMP (the “Symbolic Manipulation Program”)."

Mathematica came after SMP.

Sounds like a fairly familiar software story, no?

(1) http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2013/06/there-was-a-time-befo...