[DigiDigiorno]

While I think his notebooks and features look pretty useful, he frames the article around having invented "notebooks" 36 years ago before anyone else, and talks about other notebooks not having features that they've had since 1987. This is a pretty odd context to basically describe a new chat feature.

Is this a record that should be set straight?

I've used Jupyter since it was IPython notebook, but I don't think that community claims to be the first coming of notebooks. The accessibility of python along with the breadth and depth of the scipy community makes it a quite a tour de force. So perhaps these articles are aimed at people who only use open source tools.

[akiselev]

> Is this a record that should be set straight?

It's Wolfram. If they didn't claim to invent something fundamental in the first paragraph, I'd immediately assume the site was hacked or it's a poorly timed April fools joke written by an intern.

[cshimmin]

Yes, he is a narcissist. Smart guy, cool products, but it's just like how Trump cannot talk about anything without shoehorning in a statement like "I got more votes than any sitting president ever" when being asked about something completely unrelated.

My favorite example is when Caltech put out a press release about a young woman got her PhD and nearly beat Wolfram's record for youngest PhD from Caltech. He felt immediately compelled to write a long winded several-thousand word essay about how glad he is to still have the record for being the youngest PhD, by a full two weeks! And also, he wanted to remind everyone that he knew Richard Feynman. Cringe...

[ElFitz]

That sounds quite sad. Just like bragging about high-school. At 36.

[electroly]

What's the predecessor with a notebook interface from before 1987? I'm not aware of one. Wolfram loves to claim he invented stuff but this one might actually be true.

The Wikipedia article suggests a contemporary in 1987 (MathCAD) but I'm not seeing a Mathematica/Jupyter-style notebook interface before that year. That would seem to have been the year of the notebook interface, and Mathematica 1.0 did come out that year with one. As far as Wolfram claims go, this one doesn't seem too offensive.

[theodoregray]

It's a fair claim if you make it for Wolfram Research rather than Stephen Wolfram personally (which is all he ever does).

Jupyter notebooks were inspired by Mathematica notebooks: that's widely known and has been explicitly said in blog posts and elsewhere by the creators of Jupyter. It's no secret… And as the designer and developer of Mathematica notebooks I am flattered and honored that my ideas are now so widely used, even if it is in a product other than the one I wrote myself.

Time for a trip down memory lane. There were several notebook-adjacent products around at that time (1987) but none of them implemented notebooks as we know them today.

At the time I was using Xcode, which had a terminal-like interface that was a plain text document in which you could put all the shell commands you needed to build your app. This could include calls to the compiler, linker, or just any generic shell commands. To evaluate a given command (which could be one or more lines long) you had to manually select the exact range of text you wanted to run, which was kind of irritating. Any output would be placed directly below the input line. Because the document was pure plain text, it had no way of knowing what was input and what was output, or distinguish new output from old. So all the outputs accumulated, and you had to manually select and delete them periodically. It was an improvement over a glass teletype terminal interface, but I thought I could do better for Mathematica (code name Omega at the time).

The solution I came up with was to create a text document that was annotated with “zones” delimited by vertical bars along the right side of the screen (where cell brackets are now). Initially I used different black and white texture patterns on 4 or 5 pixel wide vertical bars. One texture for input and another texture for output.

This immediately gave two huge advantages: first, you didn’t have to manually select the range of a multi-line input. Just putting the cursor anywhere within an input zone and evaluating would evaluate the whole input. Second, because the system was keeping track of what was output, old output could be deleted automatically and replaced with new output.

Initially I called these things zones, but Steve Jobs suggested I use large close-square-bracket symbols instead of patterned bars, and think of them more like cells in a spreadsheet than like zones in a text document. Once you have brackets instead of bars, it’s immediately obvious that you could have larger brackets that encompass two or more cells. So I created cell groups, initially just to group input/output pairs, but of course it’s not a big leap to also have sections and subsections, then different cell types, styles, graphics cells, etc.

These key defining features of notebooks did not exist in any other system at the time, and to the best of my knowledge were not independently developed by other people. All the current notebook systems that share these broad features, definitely including Jupyter notebooks, derive from the original Mathematica notebooks I developed in 1987-8. (There are other styles of user interface, including some used by Maple and Matlab around the same time, that are called notebooks, but they did not share the key features I’ve described. They were and are fine products that I’m sure have both advantages and disadvantages compared to our Notebooks, but unlike our Notebooks, they are not the precursors of Jupyter.)

So can Stephen Wolfram personally claim to have invented notebooks? No, and he doesn’t: he claims that Wolfram Research did, which is true, since I was one of the co-founders of that company, and I invented that form of notebook.

Theodore

[B1FF_PSUVM]

(Got curious if it was officially credited, found it was)

Item #8 at https://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/scrapbook/

""""

1987: The Mathematica front end begins to take shape…

[screenshots]

(Theo Gray invents cells and groups… and other things still seen today…)

"""

[cshimmin]

Amazing, thank you for taking the time to share this! Big fan of notebooks in general and of Mathematica in particular.

[stabbles]

Even if true it's unnecessary. I just can't read anything written by Wolfram without rolling my eyes

[nmstoker]

Likewise. Especially when it's liberally sprinkled with his catch phrase: "A new kind of..."

It's unfortunate as clearly he has a huge amount to contribute. Maybe with an LLM someone can build a de-Stepheniser that takes in his pompous, smug text and outputs something more mellow and reasonable whilst keeping all the facts, which is what we are there for after all.

[zaps]

A new kind of new kind

[akiselev]

Not even typeclasses are safe from Wolfram!

[Frost1x]

Of course it's unnecessary, but I suspect there's at least some substance to this claim. If it were anyone else, a harmless plug like this would be accepted by most, might even be an interesting nugget a reader would appreciate. The issue is the style of claim (being the originator) is dropped far more than it should be.

I'm personally a fan of many ideas Wolfram pushes, just not a fan of the style they're pushed. I'd say I'm not in the minority, to the point it's a tired cliche.

[bookofjoe]

"Only the great are permitted great faults."—La Rochefoucauld

[mnky9800n]

The only reasonable response

[ray__]

I was always under the impression that Donald Knuth “invented” notebooks in 1984¹. Maybe Mathematica was the first to implement it, but that’s not the impression you get from the article.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming

[esjeon]

AFAICT, literate programming does not imply interactive workflow. Also, Mathematica notebooks are extremely flexible thanks to its lisp-like language, and it's not really about writing docs and code. You can draw diagrams, format texts and paragraphs, and embed dynamic/interactive elements. It's indeed the first and the foremost in its direction.

[fnoof]

Theodore Gray, cofounder of wolfram research, was responsible for notebooks I believe.

> I wrote the Notebook user interface for Mathematica and led the user interface group for over 20 years.

https://home.theodoregray.com/

[anonzzzies]

Wrote or thought of the concept are not the same.

[theodoregray]

See my long comment on another comment in this thread. I both thought of some of the key ideas, and implemented them.

[burkaman]

Seems like it's debatable depending on your definition of "notebook": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notebook_interface#History

But also, even if it's true, it's kind of an offputting way to start the article. I know that's his thing and I know it's discussed every time one of these is posted here so apologies for the repetitive observation.

[abecedarius]

That wiki page says

> According to Stephen Wolfram: "The idea of a notebook is to have an interactive document that freely mixes code, results, graphics, text and everything else.

By that description Smalltalk with its workspace goes back to the 70s. (I don't know if there's anything closer to the Mathematica notebooks from that era.)

[relaytheurgency]

Very off putting. I hate to admit that I stopped reading afterward. I don't like to be that way, but there's a lot to read out here.

[rvcdbn]

If it makes you feel any better, same.

[donpark]

Having been there when it was first announced, I think his "claim" has substance. Mathematica clearly defined the "notebooks" UI as it is known today.

[simsla]

It's not about him being right or not, but about it being irrelevant.

[pedrosorio]

In a blog post about integrating LLMs into the notebook paradigm, going back to the invention of notebooks by the same company is irrelevant?

[esjeon]

The notebook interface of Mathematica is simply unique. It is based on a Lisp-like language (Wolfram language), and fully exploits everything that Lisp can offer (and Lisp can get weird infinitely). It provides an unmatched level of freedom and versatility to the end-user. Wolfram is clearly the first one who built a end-user interface this much powerful, and nothing literally comes close, even Jupyter.

So, yeah, seeing that Jupyter is being used more broadly than Mathematica, Wolfram should feel uncomfortable. (Also note that Jupyter is officially inspired by Mathematica.)

[paulgb]

> I've used Jupyter since it was IPython notebook, but I don't think that community claims to be the first coming of notebooks.

My recollection (which could be wrong, it's been a while) is that SageMath’s notebook preceeded iPython notebooks. IIRC iPython started as a CLI repl, which may have come before the notebook.

(Mathematica came before all of them, and likely inspired SageMath’s interface)

[williamstein]

Tom Boothby, Alex Clemesha and I wrote the first web based notebook interface in 2006, which was indeed the Sage Notebook. It was very painful at the time - jquery wasn’t even a thing yet! It was inspired by Mathematica notebooks, mainly because Alex was a heavy Mathematica user when he was a physics undergrad at UCSD. Similarly, Fernando Perez’s Ipython CLI was also inspired by Mathematica notebooks. I personally didn’t use Mathematica notebooks a lot, and was even more inspired by various clever Emacs modes and also Mathcad, and by the first version of Google docs. In any case, we were all inspired by Mathematica notebooks!

[jjoonathan]

Speaking of which, has anyone made an open source pretty printed input interface for sage or do I have to keep flogging my old Mathematica 7 license for a few more years?

[bachmeier]

This doesn't crack my list of the top 1000 programming debates, but it's not controversial to say that given that literate programming, the Smalltalk IDE, and the REPL were all around before Mathematica notebooks, they didn't bring any new ideas to the world. It may still have been an innovation to create a remix of ideas borrowed from others.

[b215826]

Notebooks are just glorified REPLs, and they've been around since the early days of Lisp.

[slowmovintarget]

Every time I see "Notebooks" I think of Literate Programming, shrug, and bump the "Learn Org Mode tangling" priority up a notch.

[lmeyerov]

Winner!

[taeric]

Community may not claim to be the first with notebooks; but they certainly seem to think they have something nobody else has with it. Per their website, "The Jupyter Notebook is the original web application for creating and sharing computational documents. It offers a simple, streamlined, document-centric experience."

Which, I suppose I can cede that they are among the first "web applications" that do this. But I have a hard time really getting behind a ton of the discussion on it. Even talking about the "breadth and depth" of part of the python community is to ignore how much had been done for years in the mathematica community.

[williamstein]

They do say what you quote with those words, but I think their intention is just trying to clarify the difference between Jupyter classic and JupyterLab. The Sage notebook predates the Jupyter project by at least five years, but was visually and functionally very similar.

[taeric]

To be fair, I'm not so worried on this. Even if Jupyter was what introduced some (many?) folks to notebooks, that is fine.

I was soured as early advocates were pitching it as way more impressive than it is. With some being proud of themselves for realizing you can put a "pip install" at the top of the notebook, thinking that somehow made it repeatable. I recall senior engineers wanting notebooks to have prod access so that you could deploy from a notebook. And thinking they were making a good practice statement. Ugh.