Why Wolfram Mathematica did not use Lisp (2002)

I've never met him but have read some of his stuff over the years and talked to a few people who have (met him).

He strikes me a clearly very smart, just not as smart as he thinks he is (not uncommon, but more rare at his level of talent I think). An aside: For what it's worth, I find the "genius" label problematic in general, not just for him. I think it's a concept that probably has useful application, but to His abilities as a technical writer are middling, unfortunately, and at some point being able to communicate your ideas is almost as important as the ideas.

I too wonder how much further Mathematica could have got if he hadn't pushed away a number of clearly talented people.

This might be obvious to many, but the language of Mathematica has better support for ("abstract") currying than Lisp, something like

A[B, C][X, Y][Z]

does not straightforwardly translate into an S-Expression but is potentially convenient for symbolic algebra. I believe that I read this emphasis on currying in one of Wolfram's own accounts on how Mathematica came to be. It is probably also important that the internal data structure used by Mathematica is not a list, I think the support for "level specs" points at how internally the data is most likely represented, although I'm not sure.

I wonder if Wolfram's 100-times-slower reference point was based on a very particular comparison. Suppose you benchmarked a numerical algorithm that dealt with a lot of matrix-vector operations. And suppose you compared, on the one hand, a C or Fortran implementation that used arrays and native machine finite-precision numbers, against a Lisp implementation that used lists and the sort of "exact" arithmetic described in the usenet post.

This would not, of course, be a good comparison between the languages, but it might well give you a 100x speed difference. Taking Pitman's story at face value, it sounds like Wolfram wasn't very sophisticated about these things, and wasn't open to listening to explications. So he might have extrapolated a single dumb benchmark into a universal truth.

At the same time, it sounds like Pitman tried to convince Wolfram to represent floats as the ratio of two bignums, "with lots of other hidden bits to assure that any decimalization had enough bits to be precise." I can understand Wolfram not particularly wanting to taste any of that pie. I have worked with a simulation platform that uses paired BigNums just for time values (other values in the simulation use regular double-precision variables), and it was a big drain on simulation speed.

But isn't this the ultimate point of "science studies" (broadly put) since the days of Kuhn, Lakatos, Latour and so on?

I mean, Wolfram's bizarre confirmation bias about discrete automata is (apparently) apparent to the computer-y people because we've seen discrete automata and have goofed with all sorts of complexity-generating simple formalisms (L-systems, genetic algorithms, ...) that are impressive for giggles (and some industrial applications) but don't amount to a kind of Kurzweilian Transcendence.

... but we're not all mathy enough to pick apart what string/brane theorists or even orthodox quantum gravitationists are doing and say with (possibly misguided) confidence that it's no hope for a theory of everything. The people who do are continental philosophers who tend to get laughed out of the room, often because they have silly overarching theories (Zizek has a couple of points about quantum physics, but then, he thinks psychoanalysis explains human history) that must be relentlessly mocked.

Mathematica is an interesting case study for a general-purpose software package that happens to be more feature-full and functional -- not just "more convenient" or "better UX" -- than any open-source counterparts.

I tend to use some proprietary scientific software, but a lot of it is because academia already has already invested in codebases for, say, Stata, GAMS, Matlab and so on. But Matlab is two steps removed from raw Fortran; and what sets it apart from the many identical-syntax clones are a few narrowly-oriented toolsets aimed at some kinds of engineers.

Mathematica is the only one I buy versions for my home computer. It's very, very good.