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Wolfram's ego has always been the most off putting thing about him and his project. I was quite disappointed by the lack of Clojure relevant material in this Keynote and the unabashed emphasis on himself and his product.
I don't know if his narcissism rises to the level of a disorder, but I do think it limits him in some important ways.
Once as a new grad I asked (after he gave a talk on the virtues of oss) why the newly released Wolfram language wasn’t open source.
He called me naïve, said that my question was childish, then asked for the next question.
If dunking on a 23 year old makes him feel good about himself, so be it. I couldn’t imagine working anywhere near him.
I wonder what he does behind closed doors.
Maybe I'm misinterpreting, but this reads to me like you were trying to get a rise out of him and succeeded... it's posing a question that includes the assertion that he's hypocrite (talk on oss virtues -> own software not oss) live in front of an audience.
insults aren't an argument, if Wolfram doesn't want to get called out for being a hypocrite a good solution is to not be a hypocrite. The fact Wolfram had no actual answer beyond an insult and dodging the question is pretty telling
Insults are justified if some dick is asking a question trying to get a rise out of him. There is ZERO need to answer questions of that nature.
As self absorbed as wolfrsam is it's obvious what's going on. There is NOTHING hypocritical about it. He wants to profit off of his own wolfram language. But at the same time he appreciates the ideals, benefits and other great things that come out of OSS.
It's like the video game industry. Let me put it this way, if Closed source didn't exist video games at the triple A level likely wouldn't exist. If open source didn't exist, linux likely wouldn't exist either. Both are good.
But I don't have to explain this to you. We all are aware of this on some level. Everyone and I mean everyone literally knows what I just said.
Wolfram talking about the good parts of OSS doesn't justify some ass hole from the audience subtly trying to call him a hypocrite with a targeted question like that because BOTH closed source and open source are good. Wolframs response was justified there was no need for him to spend extra time explaining something that's totally obvious to someone who not only already knows the answer but is only asking the question for nefarious reasons.
Sure, it may say something about his (in)ability to be diplomatic or emotionally controlled, but someone can rightly feel unobligated to respond to an accusation of hypocrisy in the middle of a q/a
Asking about a perceived inconsistency isn't always "trying to get a rise out of someone". It's absolutely wild to me that people are saying that posing this question is implicitly bad faith, or trying to "humiliate" Wolfram or whatever.
And like, while I generally think OSS == good, there's lots of software that I think doesn't need to be (or even shouldn't be) OSS, but I have coherent reasons for that.
I had the same impression; however, after seeing a few livestreams with his employees discussing development, bugs, and design ideas, he does seem respectful and does constructive criticism quite well. I know that's not "closed door" behavior, but seems genuine.
Wolfram definitely has a big ego. It makes him less likeable but none of it justifies what you did.
Knowing what you did... trying to humiliate him in front of a crowd I'm glad he dunked on you. I can't imagine working with some young person who thinks he's smart trying to humiliate and overshadow someone for no reason.
Call you niave? Yeah, you were niave.
> I don't know if his narcissism rises to the level of a disorder
I don’t really know much about him except for his ego, which seems to overshadow all of his achievements.
The wolfram language is at its core is M-expressions (what John McCarthy originally was going to use to program lisp ) . Also, he saw that symbolic programming languages were something you could productize and he beat out all the lisp machines and kept it as software. He seized the opportunity of making a product that is useful to Mathematicians and basically has a huge vendor lock in from universities. Sage is very far behind as an open source solution.
With the wolfram language he wants to make a larger and larger libraries and try to make it more of a general purpose language but it has similar problems that lisp has but also that it’s really only targeting academia. I tried to use the cloud version but it never was really useful.
With wolfram alpha it was interesting to use but now Google can perform most of what that does now
The biggest problem with the language is that it’s extremely hard to learn and mathematicians are moving off of the platform.
Yeah, Mathematica is basically MACSYMA on steroids. Wolfram is indubitably a genius, and he took it far past what the general research community and even the Lisp research community did. But I can't blame him for choosing to become a billionaire rather than a vulnerable and derided eccentric like RMS. I hope he chooses to share his work after his death.
I've had this comment in my bookmarks for a while. Always good for a laugh -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9798333
That's hilarious. I can't deny that he is incredibly intelligent, but it always makes me think what he could accomplish if he had humility and could get along well with other highly intelligent technologists
I do understand the pushback on Wolfram's egotism and self-branding stuff, but he is absolutely wonderful to listen to and still comes across as a bit of a genius. I think history will be kind to him.
He has done what many of us want to achieve. Billion dollar SW company that is privately owned, that now enables him to pursue his intellectual interests.
What's absolutely admirable is that he managed to start a successful business in scientific computing. That's no easy feat.
I beg to differ.
I think that in the current era, where there is a lot of live footage of people and uncurated writings like twitter, the stature of 'the genius' will inevitably be reduced. Consider someone like Newton where everything we know is very filtered, and compare to say Richard Dawkins' twitter feed where he says random stuff that is sometimes ill-considered and posts pictures of his broken windscreen. Elon Musk is probably another example.
This is probably a good thing overall, seeing this juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane.
The internet would have not reduced the stature of Ramanujan and Von Neumann in any way. See Terry Tao for an example.
I learned a lot watching the demo. Twice in the last three years I have signed up for Wolfram Desktop (about $30/month) and experimented with it. They even added some semantic web and SPARQL support. Watching his demo was good documentation.
Both times I signed up for the service, I canceled after a few months because I didn’t have a real use case.
Ten years ago, I experimented with my own Clojure to Wolfram Language bindings
https://github.com/mark-watson/clojure_wolfram_alpha
This has been my experience too. I think it would be more empowering if I were not a dev.
I often go to wolframalpha if I want an answer to something fast and easy. Half the time I don't express the right question or the results go somewhere else. In those times, I need to write some code. Still, it is nice when the answer pops up.
This thread gives me an idea: a browser extension to gray out content using sentiment analysis [1]. I suspect some people may have even seen the video and found some useful stuff to share/comment about it, but it is just annoying/time consuming to find such comments in here in between all the Wolfram hate :-p
What's the state of the art on sentiment analysis? Is it more or less reliable these days? :-)
1:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentiment_analysis#
The precursor to peril sensitive sunglasses?
I had never heard of Mathematica before.
I'm pretty sure I'd never use it for anything but one thing that caught my eye is how easy it is to generate mock data. E.g. WordList
Can I ask you how old are you? Or who do you work?
Most of people in tech do not use Mathematica but I would put a lot of chips on a bet that most heard of it. That's why I'm courious
I would bet most techy people my age (mid 20's) are aware of Wolfram Alpha, but maybe not Mathematica.
Jupyter notebook was inspired by Mathematica (as stated by it's author).
And Mathematica was inspired by REPL-style languages (LISP, APL) that go back to the dawn of computing.
It’s one of the best pieces of software in the world, with things like Microsoft Excel and Google Maps. It is run by an absolutely insufferable guy but he does a good job with it.
It starts interesting but it then kinda becomes a Mathematica/Wolfram marketing stunt ?
Classic Wolfram then?
edit: watching it.. SMP, Wolfram, computational language, he did all of that for past 40 years of course, he even managed to put himself in the same sentence as John McCarthy, they invented notebooks and then he's showcasing Mathematica/notebook.. I actually quite like Wolfram, but sometimes he's just a tad too much.
He forgot about Clojure after a minute or so. Never forget your audience.
Mathematica uses a functional language at its core. As a functional language enthusiast (including Clojure, although I haven't used it for anything professionally) I find discussions about any functional language interesting.
In other words, I doubt the only thing Clojure folks care about is Clojure.
I agree, but I had seen videos of him describing Mathematica before, and it's the exact same script. One usually tailors the delivery for the audience.
He had a live Clojure demo going near the end.
neat overview of mathematica, or wolfram desktop or whatever.. angle being language design.. but yeah, clojure disappeared as soon as the camera turned on.
I think the audience would appreciate Mathematica because the two languages are both Lisp.
Perhaps he should have accentuated the Lispyness of it though.
I'm normally sensitive to people being full of themselves and I've no such sensation with Wolfram. I'm fascinated by what he has to say; I find his perspective on computational and programming languages, him being a specialist outsider, insightful and valuable.
The problem with such accomplished and genius people is that when they talk about what they did, it feels too much.
Guess what: it is much.
Thanks, I came over here to see whether it goes anywhere worthwhile.
Every utterance from Wolfram is Mathematica marketing, even when he writes (amazing) eulogies for his late friends.
I can't figure out if Wolfram is a brilliant scientist or a brilliant carney.
Why not both?
There's a certain type of "success trap" where one's first success is so significant that they don't ever need to figure out how to work with other people (or at least people who are peers and not underlings), and I think that's where the "carney" element comes from, where you're sort of drunk on your own hubris (regardless of actual merit)
I met Mr. Wolfram once, chatted with him for quite a while.
He was super down to earth and kind, even though it was obvious to both of us that he was completely out of my league.
I saw him give a talk at SXSW and deal very patiently with idiots in the crowd that were using the q & a session to score cheap political points.
Overall, I was pretty impressed with the man. Much smarter than I'll ever be.
Oh, if I had to talk to him, I would bring up something exotic like rock skipping on water and how he would beat the record. Watch how his brain works.
Wolfram is on from -2:15:40
+9:40:10 seems a useful timestamp reference to me if your YouTube client references from the start of video.
At +10:06:00, he starts talking a bit about clojure. 26 minutes into his presentation at a clojure conference and he talks about clojure for well under 2 minutes, most of which was analyzing the text on the wikipedia page for clojure...
At +10:16, he then very briefly demos a linkage from the clojure repl into the Wolfram Engine, which is arguably the only part that's specifically interesting to most conference watchers.
If this were a keynote at a Wolfram conference, it would have been a better fit than as a keynote at a Clojure conference.
Where does he even get money from? A quick Google suggests Mathematica is used by approximately no one. Some kinda sweetheart university licensing deal?
Mathematica has been pervasive in the scientific and engineering community for about 30 years (although becoming less so as more people use Jupyter, R, and other solutions).
No, it's just that some people are not as good at quick Google searches as they think.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=m...
also, on Linkedin: 1500 postings for mathematica, 150,000 postings for MATLAB? Don't get me wrong I use a lot of dead software too, it gets things done. Just saying, Mathematica might be a bit less Apple, and a bit more Amiga, at this point.