[ericjang]

I thought this was a wonderfully written account of Ada and Babbage's role in modern computing. It was delightful to see how someone from Victorian society would express the frustration of debugging:

I am in much dismay at having got into so amazing a quagmire & botheration with these Numbers, that I cannot possibly get the thing done today. …. I am now going out on horseback. Tant mieux

Stephen Wolfram does add a few self-congratulatory remarks, but by and large it didn't really bother me for this article. Perhaps this is all part of some grand scheme to inflate his own work, but I learned a lot of history reading the article that I might not otherwise have by researching it myself. I think this piece was well-written enough to be taken at face value.

[lucozade]

I think I'll have a New Year's resolution to write quagmire in bug reports where I would have written spaghetti.

Might be harder to get the impact assessment to choose from: crash, error, incorrect function, botheration.

But I'll give it a go.

[FD3SA]

>Stephen Wolfram does add a few self-congratulatory remarks.

This is the man to a T. I think he would have done well in Victorian England. He is a clinical narcissist, and is incapable of mentioning any topic, subject, or fact without inserting a remark about his achievements.

It gets comical once you get to know him. I'd start pointing things out to him if I ever spoke to him.

"Stephen, this steak is delicious. Didn't you invent the software that allowed the design of the temperature sensors on modern grills?"