[sterlind]

Graph rewriting systems are really neat. I've been working in Mathematica lately, and the language is a term-rewriting system. It's been really powerful and intuitive and for the life of me I can't understand why it's not more common.

Specifically, I read about the SubsetCases predicate: SubsetCases[expr, pattern] returns subsets of expr that match the pattern. You can draw a triangle graph, put slots as the node names, and do SubsetCases[graph,triangle] to pull out all the triangle subgraphs! Mind-blowing. You can also transform graphs really easily like this. Phenomenally powerful, though the computational complexity must get gnarly.

[mgdlbp]

With the 13.1 release last month came a substantial HN discussion centred around how cool, yet proprietary Mathematica is.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31928608

That kind of also describes every other Wolfram-related submission :/

[Banana699]

Comparing Wolfram's other works to Mathematica would be flattering. His massive book where he proposes "A New Kind Of Science" is a long love letter to himself. I mean, I haven't tried to work on something for 20 years, but plenty did, none of them is as arrogant and utterly self-absorbed as Wolfram is. At least Mathematica doesn't print "btw, I'm a genius, and fuck traditional programming langs" every time you evaluate an expression.

His recent "Physics Fundamentals" project is even worse, I see 0 collabration or critique from mainstream physics, 0 testable predictions or actual real-world significance to all the CS-Physics mixed salad. The only thing that sorta kinda could be described as physics is that he can re-derieve some traditional physics out of the new theory with some assumptions. Despite me not being a physicist, my understanding is that this is quite low-bar for a new physics theory, almost the bare minimum, enough to not consider you a total crank, but not for anything else.