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Comment by dakiol | Hacker News Reader

Despite all the negativity towards Wolfram, he’s one of the few out there whom I’m jealous about. He gets to work on his own products, gets time to develop his own theories about important stuff and using his own tools. That’s basically my dream. Who cares if at the end, his findings have “no substance”, he’s living the (nerd) dream.

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You might also like meeting Chuck Moore, inventor (or as he says, "discoverer") of Forth. He has done pretty much the same thing. It's a great way to be if you buy into the Forth vision, but for most of us, Forth has too many shortcomings. Roger Levy on Usenet:

> The problem with comparisons with Chuck Moore's philosophy of perfection is that we're trying to do things he has no interest in. We're trying to live in the real world. ... for the time being the rest of the world isn't content to tinker tiny programs into perfection in a cabin in the woods, barely able to articulate their value in a universally cogent way.

He's one of the few people who were able to turn scientific software into a profitable business. That's quite an achievement.

This is actually the first Ive heard about any negativity. Are there a couple articles about whats not to like? To be far, I only know about his website and some tool, and that he's intelligent and good at math (which is likely not enough knowledge about that guy), but I always assumed his work was geared towards serious researchers and not really meant for someone like me (little math and physics).

I'm not trying to stir the pot or create infighting on HN, just Ive never heard a bad thing about him until I see the comments here.

He was a child prodigy and published world-class work on quarks, QM, and subatomic particles while he was still a teenager. More recently he has been more interested in an imaginary world that only exists in his imagination and on paper. He's made a lot of discoveries there and insists that the analogy between his discoveries and the real world is major big brain stuff. He's still very productive in math and computer science, but not in physics.

Thank you. Thats not as bad as I thought it was going to be based on the comments.

The challenge, for historians of science, is to segregate Wolfram’s genuine accomplishments, which are considerable, from this stuff.

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