Well, it's not entirely surprising to hear an anecdote about a young (19 year old), brilliant programmer arrogantly dismissing legitimate possibilities.
He's still arrogantly dismissing them.
Fair enough.
Why Wolfram Mathematica did not use Lisp (2002)
81–90 of 145 posts
Re: Why Wolfram Mathematica did not use Lisp (2002)
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
OpenOffice is "good enough"; where Word isn't an option, it does the job. GIMP isn't even trying; it's not in the same market as Photoshop or casual image editing, which is well served by web apps these days. (One wonders what it is for; padding developer CVs, possibly) Finally, nonlinear video editing hardly qualifies for "general purpose" -- and is there anything worth mentioning as for open source offerings? Mathe…
Did I misunderstand or are you arguing GIMP is for "padding developer CVs"? That's a... fringe opinion, to say the least.
Well, GIMPs UI at least is totally unusable. I ended up using Krita instead, which actually has a UI that makes sense. Additionally, even Krita supports a lot more stuff than GIMP – from proper animations, keyframes to all kinds of color spaces. (Yes, 32-bit floats for CMYK color spaces are possible in Krita)
Re: Why Wolfram Mathematica did not use Lisp (2002)
#83"During the dinner discussion leading up to this definition the foreword to one of the Mathematica books was mentioned, where Stephen Wolfram (in third person) wrote "Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica and is widely regarded as the most important innovator in scientific and technical computing today." In honour of this self-assessment I suggest we call the unit of ego the Wolfram." - "Monumental egos" blog…
What's the conversion factor between Wolfram's and nanodijkstras[1]?
This would be a great question to answer using Wolfram Alpha, since it does have nanodijkstras[2] and Wolfram[3]. Alas, the conversion is beyond it[4].
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xoyw8LHGtzk
[2]: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=nanodijkstra
[3]: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=wolfram
[4]: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=wolfram+to+nanodijkstra
Re: Why Wolfram Mathematica did not use Lisp (2002)
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
I once went to a talk by Wolfram to an audience of academics which he finished by saying that if he managed to find the theory of everything (which he seemed to think was a possibility), he probably wouldn't bother telling people, since theoretical physicists wouldn't understand it.
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 (a…
> The people who do are continental philosophers who tend to get laughed out of the room
And for good reason. For example, philosophers (Zizek included) raved about Badiou's Number and Numbers. It is a nice history of the approaches to formalizing the concept of number, but there is no philosophy there. As soon as Badiou or Derrida or any other continental philosophers try to do anything else with mathematics it just becomes a grossly inappropriate and confusing analogy.
Re: Why Wolfram Mathematica did not use Lisp (2002)
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did I misunderstand or are you arguing GIMP is for "padding developer CVs"? That's a... fringe opinion, to say the least.
Well, GIMPs UI at least is totally unusable. I ended up using Krita instead, which actually has a UI that makes sense. Additionally, even Krita supports a lot more stuff than GIMP – from proper animations, keyframes to all kinds of color spaces. (Yes, 32-bit floats for CMYK color spaces are possible in Krita)
Yes, GIMP's UI is pretty awkward. No disagreement here.
Still, for a lot of people, GIMP is a very valuable open source alternative to Photoshop; not as full-featured, of course, but then again, nothing is. There are lots of tutorials for achieving interesting effects using GIMP. I've never heard it described as something people learn to pad their resumes.
Krita is pretty cool, too. If I'm not mistaken, it's not a full-featured Photoshop replacement either.
Re: Why Wolfram Mathematica did not use Lisp (2002)
#86Mathematica 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 fr…
How is Mathematica generally more "feature-full"? What are you comparing it to?
Presumably Maxima (http://maxima.sourceforge.net/) or SciPy (http://www.scipy.org/)
Re: Why Wolfram Mathematica did not use Lisp (2002)
#87Mathematica 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 fr…
> 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. Isn't the world littered with such examples? Office is more feature-full than OpenOffice, Photoshop is more feature-full than GIMP, Illustrator is more feature-full than Inkscape, InDesign is more featur…
Yeah I don't know why he things it is rare. It's rarer that open-source software is more featureful and functional than competing closed source software. In fact I'm struggling to think of any that are clear-cut.
The opposite is very common, as your list demonstrates. Also another big category is CAD, and CAM. There are no decent open source programs in that space at all!
Re: Why Wolfram Mathematica did not use Lisp (2002)
#88Random Wolfram story, was at lunch yesterday at my old college and respected computer scientist who originally interviewed me. He told me that he first showed Wolfram a computer. This guy was a friend of Wolfram's mother who asked for help because 8 year old Stephen was "bored with dinosaurs" and wanted something else to think about.
How did the respected computer scientist feel about having unleashed Stephen Wolfram upon the computing world? :)
Re: Why Wolfram Mathematica did not use Lisp (2002)
#89Wolfram himself has a far more detailed write-up on the development of SMP and Mathematica. http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2013/06/there-was-a-time-befo... It might be biased or self-serving but it's more interesting than an offhand USENET recollection about a brilliant and arrogant young man.
People's experience with Stephen Wolfram is that he is very biased and self-serving, hence the popularity of an anecdote from an external source.
Re: Why Wolfram Mathematica did not use Lisp (2002)
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. Isn't the world littered with such examples? Office is more feature-full than OpenOffice, Photoshop is more feature-full than GIMP, Illustrator is more feature-full than Inkscape, InDesign is more featur…
Yeah I don't know why he things it is rare. It's rarer that open-source software is more featureful and functional than competing closed source software. In fact I'm struggling to think of any that are clear-cut. The opposite is very common, as your list demonstrates. Also another big category is CAD, and CAM. There are no decent open source programs in that space at all!
> It's rarer that open-source software is more featureful and functional than competing closed source software. In fact I'm struggling to think of any that are clear-cut.
I think the canonical example has been web browsers, for instance.