[boxfire]

Yeah, I find it circuitously poses similar questions over and over, with vague allegories towards hypothetical application, and provides no real conclusions. For example in the part about evaluation order, a long walk through all the different observations, and some small ideas of what "mathematica does", and as I read hoping for a final conclusion on the section, a redirect to a new subject. Feels like I was listening to a joke with no punchline, on the edge of the seat over and over again. In the end I don't know what I was hoping for, but I feel the key works in the field of Algorithmic Information Theory, expresses all of these ideas more succinctly, the irony of which is not lost on me. Wolfram is a physicist who wants to be a computer scientist? A computer scientist who wants to be a mathematician? None of the above in the pursuit of all of the above? I always walk away from his ramblings feeling the same way. I did find he had some great occasionally insightful observation, but to what effect? I'd like to see what happens when he takes an approach like this to a more applied problem, rather than this endless open-ended "future of ..." (Physics, computing, etc)