[markusstrasser]

Why are people getting hung up on his hubris? If his megalomania gives us Mathematica who cares. It's a phenomenal accomplishment. It can, out of the box, do hundreds of things that'd take you weeks in python/julia/etc or would be entirely impossible for most in other systems.

[wolverine876]

> Why are people getting hung up on his hubris? If his megalomania gives us Mathematica who cares.

We've had some bad results taking that approach recently - which we really should have anticipated, with millenia-old stories warning us about it. For one thing, megalomaniacs tend to be frauds (perhaps because, to be a megalomaniac, it's necessary to lie to yourself); maybe Mathematica will turn out to be the FTX, or Tesla auto-pilot, or ..., of mathematical software/languages.

No way - how could that happen? All those people at Mathematica would just go along with it, right? There's no evidence! It would be too brazen!

[zamadatix]

Mathematica has been publicly available for 35 years now, this is the 14th release. The tool has worked extremely well and been tangible for decades, with the value during that period being in the customer's direct use. In what ways does this remind you of FTX or Tesla auto-pilot?

[jhbadger]

Well, he claimed that Mathematica, particularly cellular automata implemented in Mathematica, would bring about "A New Kind of Science" as described in his thick book of that name. It didn't of course -- people like to still play with cellular automata like The Game of Life (or my favorite, Wireworld), but no revolution in science involving CAs has occurred. The whole thing was a marketing ploy for Mathematica disguised as science. Not mention that the only truly new thing mentioned in the book (that CAs can be Turing complete) wasn't even Wolfram's finding, but rather Matthew Cook's (who sued him for not crediting it to him, although they have since settled).

[zamadatix]

Wolfram does lots of wacky stuff but how does it make Mathematica any less tangibly useful today? He can want to use Mathematica as part of eradicating cancer using toilet brushes and it would still not change that Mathematica is and has been an extremely useful piece of software for decades. The point isn't every single thought he has is gospel revolution it's that Mathematica is already a delivered value.

[me_me_me]

That's still not very adequate comparison.

Musk has been promising self driving for... what 10 years now?

Hyping a working tool like Mathematica that will bring a revolution is a vague hope rather than a concrete promise of outcome.

[fooker]

Musk doesn't do this for you.

Notice the pattern, he does it to attract the kind of engineers attracted to solving 'unsolvable' problems.

Whether that's a good strategy is up in the air.

[me_me_me]

ah yes mastermind musk defense.

He is not 'lying' he is 'envisioning future to motivate engineers'.

[nextaccountic]

> megalomaniacs tend to be frauds

Eeeh. Scott Aaronson review [0] and Cosma Shali's review [1] of NKS kinds of points to this direction, so he may well be a fraud. The plagiarism case regarding rule 110 (and attempts to hide this through NDA and lawsuits [2]) doesn't do him any favors, either. Indeed maybe the biggest problem of Wolfram isn't the megalomany per se, but the total unwillingness to give credit to others and cite their damn papers. Wolfram simply isn't in the business of sharing his bibliography, which is problematic for a scientist.

However, the newer Wolfram Physics [3] [4] looks so damn promising that I'm willing to entertain possible quackery. I mean it surely has many ideas regarding how a digital universe would look like; he may be all wrong in the details but his ideas look important contributions to me. I sometimes think what's like to be at the frontier of science; today we take relativity (for example) for granted but there was a time when it was up in the air. When I read Wolfram's stuff stuff I just think this could very well be true, and while there's absolutely no evidence for it the conjectures all make sense.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0206089

[1] http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13961947

[3] https://www.wolframphysics.org/

[4] https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-h...

[wolverine876]

Thanks for introducing some knowledge and fact to the discussion.

> However, the newer Wolfram Physics [3] [4] looks so damn promising that I'm willing to entertain possible quackery.

I don't know him, and clearly you know quite a bit. Still, that tradeoff is exactly where we've made our mistakes - the temptation of that payoff.

[piaste]

> maybe Mathematica will turn out to be the FTX, or Tesla auto-pilot, or ..., of mathematical software/languages.

You can install Mathematica at any time. It produces graphical output. You can see for yourself what it does, and what it does not do.

If Wolfram were making claims about a future unreleased version of Mathematica, sure, I would absolutely weigh his ego against those claims. But they are largely irrelevant when it comes to a currently existing and available product. If he were to claim that Mathematica 14 cures cancer, that would deserve eyerolls but it wouldn't tarnish the quality of the software.

[andyjohnson0]

> We've had some bad results taking that approach recently

I'm struggling to believe that Wolfram's hubris is anything like that of Trump or Musk or SBF etc. Wolfram seems like a genuinely smart person who knows he's smart, but is probably too aware of it. But he's not done anything majorly bad - and arguably has done good in creating tools for scientists and engineers. I think we need to give him a break. I certainly think that the perennial discussion of his ego is tiresome and distracting.

[3abiton]

I heard this before, but never asked, what is so special about Mathematica that cannot be done by other softwares?

[contravariant]

I'm basing this on my experience a few years back.

It's not that you can't do it with other software, Mathematica just has all of it included by default, with very comprehensive documentation. And a slick UI.

Sure you can probably do most of it in python, but you'll find yourself chasing some obscure modules to get some things working. Even just to get arbitrary precision calculations for just about everything, for example. And don't forget the importance of a documentation that explains every option with examples (barring some obscure stuff, which can be quite annoying if you encounter it).

Since it's all integrated Mathematica allows you to go from calculating Sin[2] to arbitrary precision, to calculating the derivative of Sin[2x], to showing the first 10 terms of its Taylor series. All using the same sine function.

This does have some downsides. For one it's a pretty heavy program to run. And because they want to include everything they need to be quite opinionated about certain things. There are multiple ways to define fractional derivatives for instance, since they include a function for it they must have picked one of them. And then there are the name clashes, I once had to laugh quite loudly when I tried "Rotate[{0,1}, 45deg]" and got back an image of {0,1} at a 45 degree angle.

It is an impressive piece of engineering. Which could have had much more of an impact if it was a bit more open, but oh well...

[clbrmbr]

You should give it a spin. It’s an incredibly comprehensive Computer Algebra System with all the batteries included…. No, with a small nuclear reactor in the box.

I’m just sad that I don’t have access anymore after college, being too cheap to pay for a license.

[phonon]

It comes free with a Raspberry Pi.

https://www.wolfram.com/raspberry-pi/

[forgotpwd16]

For trying and basic work can also use a free Wolfram Cloud account.

[Iwan-Zotow]

Get then free kernel and WLJS notebook

[abdullahkhalids]

- Far better language design, actually designed from ground up to write Mathematics in, rather than hacked in later.

- Specially, the language supports symbolic computation natively. In a lot of software, you have to declare symbols as symbolic variables before using them. In Mathematica, you don't have to deal with this nonsense.

- A library of both symbolic and numerical algorithms that is far far far better than any other library out there. Especially its outstanding how much symbolic computation algorithms are built in. Fairly fast numerical algorithms as well. Best of all, Mathematica guesses the best algorithm to use in a particular situation with frightening accuracy.

- A lot of Maths is just built in. Example: A number of common Groups are just there for you to immediately start playing with.

[bwanab]

I had thought of him as megalomaniac, but I recently heard him do a two hour podcast on the Joe Walker Podcast (formerly Jolly Swagman). He came off as relatively normal for someone who earned a Ph.D. in particle physics from Caltech at the ripe age of 20.