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Comment by giggly_gopher | Hacker News Reader

This seems like they just polished some rough edges off of the existing command line version of Mathematica. I wish they would not call it Wolfram Language. His ego/talent ratio is already so high it's NKS level buffoonery.

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Wolfram derangement syndrome, the phenomenon by which HN threads unintentionally get sucked into an arcane crowdsourced psychoanalysis project dedicated to a single person, has been off topic for years. The funny thing is that it's a mirror image of the self-obsession it purports to analyze.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Why do people feel the need to denigrate Wolfram at every turn? He is obviously a genius of the highest caliber, who has dedicated his life to making useful tools to advance science and engineering. He has made a tremendous positive impact. People should focus more on making their own positive impact instead of trying to tear Wolfram down for his awkward but ultimately harmless lack of self awareness.

My guess is that it's because his lack of self awareness generally precedes his demonstration of talent, which frequently leads to a bad impression. Also I hear he's nasty in person, though that's not relevant here.

I've known him for more than ten years -- we first met when I was a student in college. In my experience, he's always been helpful, kind, and encouraging.

That is not a universal experience.

.. because when I met him personally at a hack event in the 1980s, he was obviously in the "dominant and loud" mode, and directly commanded anyone within earshot, at most opportunities.. later, it turned out he forked his company and left the people who built Mathematica out of future profits. Silicon Valley bred people like that .. it is still common in some environments.

My grad math advisor was one of the folks who wrote significant parts in Urbana of the symbolic core; the behind the scenes team got legal settlements after that strange move. He's not from Silicon Valley; I think he'd done some early prototyping and coding himself while at CalTech (in Lisp if i recall) then came to Urbana-Champaign as a research prof, and got the team of several to build it out. [ I've been using it since 1988, and love it. ]

> His ego/talent ratio

To be fair, the denominator in this equation is fairly large, too :-)

Wolfram Language is developed by Wolfram Research. It’s a fairly sane name for a language and a company; the fact that Stephen Wolfram tends to come off as narcissistic is unrelated.

You're saying the fact that Stephen Wolfram comes off as a narcissist is unrelated to the fact that he names everything after himself?

Python isn't called "the van Rossum Language". C isn't called "the Ritchie Language" (or "the Bell language", for that matter). Lisp isn't called the "the McCarthy language". We should judge Wolfram Research's products in spite of their unfortunate names, but denying that they're the result of Wolfram's narcissism is silly at this point.

People name companies after themselves, and then they name their flagship product after the company–it's not that strange. (To be fair, in this case I would not be surprised if he named the company after himself, and then the language after himself, too. It's just that it's not relevant to keep bringing this up when it's not necessarily a strange practice.)

Half of the "Debian" name comes from Ian Murdock's first name. The other half comes from his then-girlfriend's name 'Debra'. I've never heard anybody castigate Ian/Debian for that.

Somebody naming something after themself seems a little tacky to me, but I don't think it's anything to get bent out of shape about.

Probably because Ian doesn't try to commercialize and push a proprietary system of computing on the world with Ian plastered everywhere you can see.

Is the issue the branding, or is the issue FOSS vs proprietary? I'm much more sympathetic to the later criticism, which really has nothing to do with the first I think.

Ian passed away on Dec 2015.

Wolfram is also recognizable as the Tungsten element (W). Lots of projects are named after elements.

And, you can still call it Mathematica!

About NKS, granted there's a bunch of self promotion and inflated urgency in there. But I feel like there's a useful work, cataloging in exhaustive detail a large number of systems and patterns which are built into the number system and nature.

Is there anything actually wrong with NKS aside from the tone?

I've actually never read NKS but I did read this review of it which has some criticism - http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/

> "As the saying goes, there is much here that is new and true, but what is true is not new, and what is new is not true; and some of it is even old and false, or at least utterly unsupported."

The author seems fairly knowledgeable on the subject of cellular automata.

EDIT: I see this has been posted elsewhere in the comments

I think there is consensus the tone is what's mostly wrong with the book. Amazon seems to have removed it, but "a new kind of review"[0] was absolutely hilarious and kind of accurate :)

[0] http://shell.cas.usf.edu/~wclark/ANKOS_humor.html 3rd from the top

This article pales in comparison with a presentation where he described a new Wolfram language feature (that was basically reflection) as New Kind of Programming no less. My theory is that this kind of marketing is very efficient against old-school professors who used to know Fortran, and are now in charge of spending.

NKS?

A New Kind of Science, S. Wolfram (2002)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Kind_of_Science

"A Rare Blend of Monster Raving Egomania and Utter Batshit Insanity"

http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/

But also, to be fair, a deeply fascinating mathematical picture-book.

Agreed!

It is one of my favourite works of crank science, the hardback has pride of place in that section of my library. It's beautiful, mind-expanding, awe-inspiring, and over-inflated in the grandiosity of its self-regard way past the point of parody.

New Kind of Science

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