Rather than just bashing Stephen's personality and rehashing Cosma Shalizi's driveby on NKOS, can we try and focus on the technical accomplishment that Mathematica represents? It really is an astounding system. If you enjoy functional programming, the language is super expressive and productive. The integrated libraries are fantastic -- especially if you want to chain together different knowledge domains through a co…
> I love Wolfram stuff. I'm with you 100% here, but I'm also 100% with sibling jiggawatts. To me, Mathematica is a computation environment that conveys a Lisp Machine feeling of "the machine and I are working on this problem". You know, that "assembling things live in the sky" Lisp feeling (Yegge's phrase, not mine). The only other computation environment that is right there en par in flexibility and conveyance of th…
which column?