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So, story time. I once interviewed Stephen Wolfram for IEEE's software engineering radio and I had a lot of fun doing it and he did to. We ended up running way

So, story time. I once interviewed Stephen Wolfram for IEEE's software engineering radio and I had a lot of fun doing it and he did to. We ended up running way overtime because he was having fun showing me things with Mathematica. He is a fascinating person, I successfully kept him off talking about his math / physics theories and on the idea of a programming language leading to better thinking and more break-throughs. I left the discussion pretty impressed by him and he did in the discussion have some vague worries that he maybe got so focused on the idea of a notation for science in Mathematica that he neglected the actual work that sent him on this path. But he wasn't sure that the notation wasn't more valuable itself. Notebooks, like Jupter, clearly came from his work and the other thing that hasn't reached mainstream he seems to have invented is having data sort of embedded in the programming language, in standard libraries, where it's easy to get the number of calories in the moon if it were made of cheese or whatever.

lupire 3y ago
Notation, or semantics? Mathematica has no notation, and that's the worst thing about it. Mathematics has M-Expressions, like S-Expressions, which are extremely powerfully and human-like for reasoning in multiple logical (not geometric) dimensions (using Lisp-style macro expansion)
- adamgordonbell 3y ago
  It's been a long time since the discussion, but I think he was getting at the whorf hypothesis. If you could express certain ideas easily it would enable thinking about certain things more deeply and intelligently.
  - graphe 3y ago
    Not only that, but the intonation also changes people’s personalities. Notice how there are round calming words and sharper ones, like the ohm in mantras give an o sound and a word like stab has a sharper intonation. If sapolsky believes the Sapir whorf hypothesis I do too.
schiffern 3y ago
> having data sort of embedded in the programming language, in standard libraries, where it's easy to get the number of calories in the moon if it were made of cheese or whatever. If you like this sort of thing check out Frink. https://frinklang.org/ https://frinklang.org/ I predict that within 100 years, computers will be twice as powerful, ten thousand times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them. -- Professor John Frink The units file itself is a worthy read just for the commentary. https://frinklang.org/frinkdata/units.txt https://frinklang.org/frinkdata/units.txt
- rendall 3y ago
  Ha! That's marvelous. The rants on `mol`, `hertz` and `candela` are astonishing. Well worth the price. // WARNING: Use of "Hz" will cause communication problems, errors, and make // one party or another look insane in the eyes of the other. // // In other words, if you use the Hz in the way it's currently defined by the // SI, as equivalent to 1 radian/s, you can point to the SI definitions and // prove that you follow their definitions precisely. And your physics // teacher will *still* fail you and your clients will think you're completely // incompetent because 1 Hz = 2 pi radians/s. And it has for centuries. // You are both simultaneously both right and both wrong. // You cannot win. // You are perfectly right. You are perfectly wrong. You look dumb and // unreasonable. The person arguing the opposite looks dumb and unreasonable. // // Hz == YOU CANNOT WIN // // (Insert "IT'S A TRAP" image here.)
- bmitc 3y ago
  Is there any notion of integrating Frink as a library in other languages?
jjtheblunt 3y ago
Agree with most everything, your description resonates (also a since 1988 mathematica person). Theo Gray is who came up with the notebook, that iPython -> Jupyter were a multilanguage shout-out to, and they cite such. Other UIUC professors wrote significant parts of Mathematica originally, were paid for such. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Gray https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Gray
bachmeier 3y ago
> Notebooks, like Jupter, clearly came from his work While I often hear this claim from Wolfram and his supporters, I have never seen any evidence that it was his innovation. MathCAD was the first software released with a notebook interface, and there was research using those ideas prior to the release of the first Mathematica notebook. Maybe his particular take was an improvement on the others, but the claim that it was entirely his idea seems to me to be 100% incorrect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notebook_interface#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notebook_interface#History
- adamgordonbell 3y ago
  Ah, I did not know that. My bad. Maybe he was more of a popularizer of the approach then?
  - martinky24 3y ago
    Even at Wolfram Research, Theodore Gray is credited with inventing/developting THEIR initial interpretation of the notebook interface. His Wikipedia page [1] makes that clear. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Gray https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Gray
  - bachmeier 3y ago
    I certainly won't blame anyone for saying that, given that it's repeated so often that it's turning into common knowledge.
  - justin66 3y ago
    I'd guess MathCAD was quite a bit more popular than Mathematica in the nineties, given Mathematica was something like ten times as expensive.
- duped 3y ago
  I get that it's not exactly what we consider notebooks now, but Knuth was writing about literate programming several years before MathCAD.
deviantbit 3y ago
I'm surprised Stephen didn't claim he invented saving files. I used Macsyma before Wolfram and we had front ends that had worksheets. He definitely wasn't the first.

lupire 3y ago

Notation, or semantics? Mathematica has no notation, and that's the worst thing about it. Mathematics has M-Expressions, like S-Expressions, which are extremely powerfully and human-like for reasoning in multiple logical (not geometric) dimensions (using Lisp-style macro expansion)

adamgordonbell 3y ago
It's been a long time since the discussion, but I think he was getting at the whorf hypothesis. If you could express certain ideas easily it would enable thinking about certain things more deeply and intelligently.
- graphe 3y ago
  Not only that, but the intonation also changes people’s personalities. Notice how there are round calming words and sharper ones, like the ohm in mantras give an o sound and a word like stab has a sharper intonation. If sapolsky believes the Sapir whorf hypothesis I do too.

schiffern 3y ago

> having data sort of embedded in the programming language, in standard libraries, where it's easy to get the number of calories in the moon if it were made of cheese or whatever. If you like this sort of thing check out Frink. https://frinklang.org/ https://frinklang.org/ I predict that within 100 years, computers will be twice as powerful, ten thousand times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them. -- Professor John Frink The units file itself is a worthy read just for the commentary. https://frinklang.org/frinkdata/units.txt https://frinklang.org/frinkdata/units.txt

rendall 3y ago
Ha! That's marvelous. The rants on `mol`, `hertz` and `candela` are astonishing. Well worth the price. // WARNING: Use of "Hz" will cause communication problems, errors, and make // one party or another look insane in the eyes of the other. // // In other words, if you use the Hz in the way it's currently defined by the // SI, as equivalent to 1 radian/s, you can point to the SI definitions and // prove that you follow their definitions precisely. And your physics // teacher will *still* fail you and your clients will think you're completely // incompetent because 1 Hz = 2 pi radians/s. And it has for centuries. // You are both simultaneously both right and both wrong. // You cannot win. // You are perfectly right. You are perfectly wrong. You look dumb and // unreasonable. The person arguing the opposite looks dumb and unreasonable. // // Hz == YOU CANNOT WIN // // (Insert "IT'S A TRAP" image here.)
bmitc 3y ago
Is there any notion of integrating Frink as a library in other languages?

jjtheblunt 3y ago

Agree with most everything, your description resonates (also a since 1988 mathematica person). Theo Gray is who came up with the notebook, that iPython -> Jupyter were a multilanguage shout-out to, and they cite such. Other UIUC professors wrote significant parts of Mathematica originally, were paid for such. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Gray https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Gray

bachmeier 3y ago

> Notebooks, like Jupter, clearly came from his work While I often hear this claim from Wolfram and his supporters, I have never seen any evidence that it was his innovation. MathCAD was the first software released with a notebook interface, and there was research using those ideas prior to the release of the first Mathematica notebook. Maybe his particular take was an improvement on the others, but the claim that it was entirely his idea seems to me to be 100% incorrect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notebook_interface#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notebook_interface#History

adamgordonbell 3y ago
Ah, I did not know that. My bad. Maybe he was more of a popularizer of the approach then?
- martinky24 3y ago
  Even at Wolfram Research, Theodore Gray is credited with inventing/developting THEIR initial interpretation of the notebook interface. His Wikipedia page [1] makes that clear. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Gray https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Gray
- bachmeier 3y ago
  I certainly won't blame anyone for saying that, given that it's repeated so often that it's turning into common knowledge.
- justin66 3y ago
  I'd guess MathCAD was quite a bit more popular than Mathematica in the nineties, given Mathematica was something like ten times as expensive.
duped 3y ago
I get that it's not exactly what we consider notebooks now, but Knuth was writing about literate programming several years before MathCAD.

deviantbit 3y ago

I'm surprised Stephen didn't claim he invented saving files. I used Macsyma before Wolfram and we had front ends that had worksheets. He definitely wasn't the first.