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by mrjangles 1533 days ago
I don't understand all these comments saying "Sure Wolfram may be arrogant, but he has achieved amazing things". "lets look at his work and ideas not him as a person".

... What does this even mean? Steven Wolfram has never achieved a single thing in science or mathematics. Absolutely no one has ever said otherwise, except for Steven Wolfram himself.

I used to think he was a failed scientist who, at least, was good with computers and software, but after seeing the decline in the quality of Mathematica, and the hairbrain schemes he has been leading there instead of improving his core software, it has become clear to me that he wasn't even the one responsible for Mathematica being so great, and whoever it was has now left the company.
3 comments
posix_me_less 1532 days ago
Feynman wrote something in the sense Wolfram did invent an interesting way to implement quantum chromodynamics on a computer, so he did something contributory to science.
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mrjangles 1532 days ago
You are going to need a very specific citation for that because, if he did, no one working in physics today has heard of it.
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daneelsan 1532 days ago
Didn't he invent a numbering schema for classifying CA? That should count as an achievement.
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mrjangles 1532 days ago
The fact that no one could possibly have a clue what this sentence means is a pretty good indication of how important this work was.
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daneelsan 1532 days ago
OK bud
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copperx 1532 days ago
> decline in the quality of Mathematica

Has Mathematica gone down in quality lately?

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mrjangles 1532 days ago
Every release is more bloated, runs more slowly, non of the old problems fixed or improved (e.g. still can't handle large files well and every release handling of graphics gets slower). The user manual has gone from being one the best I have ever seen to being terrible for all the new sections for the new functionality they implemented. A lot of the new functionality is badly designed, not like the old stuff which was incredible. The actual useful stuff like interfacing with external code is so old that it barely works anymore (like interfacing with c# compiled later than 2010)...etc.
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