3 ms·

Something about these Wolfram posts always sounds like a a shady late night infomercial to me. I can't quite put my finger on it.

by sayrer 18y ago

ahoyhere 18y ago
I can't find the point of this one. Was the whole point at the end that we should just code everything in Mathematica, because it's a great language "in which you can write just about anything that can be written"? And that interactive elements are bad? Cuz they're down the slippery slope? I think he's using those nifty tree animations to distract people so much they're rendered incapable of reading. (Worked for me.) And it's total linkbait.
- uberc 18y ago
  Agree it's linkbait. And yes there's a bit of self-congratulatory informercial about it. But there's an interesting underlying point at the end about the tradeoff between high-level application-specific languages and powerful general purpose languages: "I would have done that years ago, but there was no tool in existence that made it possible. 'Possible?' you say. 'Surely it’s possible in C code, or Java, or Visual Basic, or Squeak, or something.' Well, no, it’s not possible for me in C or any other such serious environment, because I’m busy and these are just fun little things. If it’s going to take hours or days to do, it’s not possible for me to do." Also, Mathematica is damned cool, if I remember correctly from grad school days. So I don't mind if those guys are a bit prone to patting themselves on the back.
  - ahoyhere 18y ago
    > So I don't mind if those guys are a bit prone to patting themselves on the back. I wouldn't care if it there was a feeling of "meta" awareness of the back-patting. Eating your own bullshit like it's tasty tasty chocolate, now that's a slippery slope you have to watch out for. Getting high on your own supply -> believing your own hype -> eating your own bullshit == quick track to irrelevency. Even if it gets you more fanboys.
    - DaniFong 18y ago
      Can you give an example of a company that isn't constantly spinning its own PR story? It's annoying, sure, but I'm not sure it's actually, from a business perspective, detrimental.
      - ahoyhere 18y ago
        The question isn't whether they're spinning, but whether they drink their own Kool-Aid, or realize that it's Kool-Aid to begin with. Me, I hype myself, but I also make self-denigrating jokes and meta-references when I'm hyping. I apply my bullshit detector to myself. Example: http://tr.im/5bucks http://tr.im/5bucks You may say "Uhh, but you're just a person," but I'm a person with a readership of about 7500, and another thousand or two on a mailing list, and I'm working on a tongue-in-cheek "What sucks about freckle time tracking?" post for my company blog. Because there are parts of our product that really suck. And we know it. Here's a reverse case study: 37Signals was a lot more reasonable 5 years ago. Their blog posts were more actionable, less hype, and more importantly, the products fit a need and evolved. They kept doing consulting to pay the bills, so they couldn't escape reality. Reality is good. Cut forward 4 years, they launch Highrise, a product that was so "less" that it was practically "nothing" and not usable for anyone. It didn't have any features people required to actually manage their customer relationships. It was just an online addressbook with comments. You couldn't even sort by people with the most recent comments. How could that help you manage anything? And they had been talking it up for months, meaning that it wasn't an addressbook with comments that was developed in a weekend. There's nothing wrong with their marketing and PR. The only issue is that they believed their own hype, and really embarrassed themselves with a totally useless product. Now, a year later, it's a little bit better, but it's no Basecamp and no Backpack.
        DaniFong 18y ago
        I should just mention Amy, that I love your work. Twistori is so cool. But my point is mostly that, despite the bullshit, Mathematica is radically more powerful for building user interfaces (up to a certain complexity) than anything I've seen. The self-hype hasn't exactly toned down over time either, so I'm less certain it's really the bad omen you make of it.
- Zak 18y ago
  The point, I think is that it's entirely too much bloody work to make a GUI using any of the tools that are common for that purpose. I recently wrote a little utility[0] (under 200 lines) in Clojure to make a folder of images greyscale. Over half the code was GUI-related. The GUI consists of a single button that launches a file chooser, a text display of files processed / files to process and an error dialog that pops up in the event of an uncaught exception. I know Swing isn't a shining example of concise code, but it's absurd that there should be so much bulk for such a simple thing. [0] http://github.com/zakwilson/imagesieve/tree/master http://github.com/zakwilson/imagesieve/tree/master
DaniFong 18y ago
The marketing message is pervasive about everything Wolfram. It gets on my nerves a bit, too. However it doesn't detract much from the information. Once I sat down and started actually using Mathematica 7, my mind was totally blown.
- ph0rque 18y ago
  > Once I sat down and started actually using Mathematica 7, my mind was totally blown. Unfortunately, 99.999...% of us can't ever reach this point, due to the cost of mathematica.
  - DaniFong 18y ago
    The student version costs $45, which is as much as a textbook, and less than one hundredth the cost of most semesters at American colleges.
    - ph0rque 18y ago
      If I understand the student licensing correctly, you can only use it for educational purposes, and only as long as you're a student. edit: also, the price is $140 for the student version: http://store.wolfram.com/view/app/mathforstudents/ http://store.wolfram.com/view/app/mathforstudents/
      - DaniFong 18y ago
        Sorry, I meant it's $45 for a semester.
        ph0rque 18y ago
        Didn't mean to get on this pricing quibble... as someone who modeled an H atom ab initio in solid-state physics class using Mathematica, I really like it, too. However, it is my firm belief that unless they make a free version available eventually [1], only a select few will get to play with it and use it to make new discoveries/progress. 1. Or someone makes an ad-supported web2.0 social-network version of it :~).

Something about these Wolfram posts always sounds like a a shady late night infomercial to me. I can't quite put my finger on it.

by sayrer 18y ago

Something about these Wolfram posts always sounds like a a shady late night infomercial to me. I can't quite put my finger on it.

ahoyhere 18y ago

I can't find the point of this one. Was the whole point at the end that we should just code everything in Mathematica, because it's a great language "in which you can write just about anything that can be written"? And that interactive elements are bad? Cuz they're down the slippery slope? I think he's using those nifty tree animations to distract people so much they're rendered incapable of reading. (Worked for me.) And it's total linkbait.

uberc 18y ago
Agree it's linkbait. And yes there's a bit of self-congratulatory informercial about it. But there's an interesting underlying point at the end about the tradeoff between high-level application-specific languages and powerful general purpose languages: "I would have done that years ago, but there was no tool in existence that made it possible. 'Possible?' you say. 'Surely it’s possible in C code, or Java, or Visual Basic, or Squeak, or something.' Well, no, it’s not possible for me in C or any other such serious environment, because I’m busy and these are just fun little things. If it’s going to take hours or days to do, it’s not possible for me to do." Also, Mathematica is damned cool, if I remember correctly from grad school days. So I don't mind if those guys are a bit prone to patting themselves on the back.
- ahoyhere 18y ago
  > So I don't mind if those guys are a bit prone to patting themselves on the back. I wouldn't care if it there was a feeling of "meta" awareness of the back-patting. Eating your own bullshit like it's tasty tasty chocolate, now that's a slippery slope you have to watch out for. Getting high on your own supply -> believing your own hype -> eating your own bullshit == quick track to irrelevency. Even if it gets you more fanboys.
  - DaniFong 18y ago
    Can you give an example of a company that isn't constantly spinning its own PR story? It's annoying, sure, but I'm not sure it's actually, from a business perspective, detrimental.
    - ahoyhere 18y ago
      The question isn't whether they're spinning, but whether they drink their own Kool-Aid, or realize that it's Kool-Aid to begin with. Me, I hype myself, but I also make self-denigrating jokes and meta-references when I'm hyping. I apply my bullshit detector to myself. Example: http://tr.im/5bucks http://tr.im/5bucks You may say "Uhh, but you're just a person," but I'm a person with a readership of about 7500, and another thousand or two on a mailing list, and I'm working on a tongue-in-cheek "What sucks about freckle time tracking?" post for my company blog. Because there are parts of our product that really suck. And we know it. Here's a reverse case study: 37Signals was a lot more reasonable 5 years ago. Their blog posts were more actionable, less hype, and more importantly, the products fit a need and evolved. They kept doing consulting to pay the bills, so they couldn't escape reality. Reality is good. Cut forward 4 years, they launch Highrise, a product that was so "less" that it was practically "nothing" and not usable for anyone. It didn't have any features people required to actually manage their customer relationships. It was just an online addressbook with comments. You couldn't even sort by people with the most recent comments. How could that help you manage anything? And they had been talking it up for months, meaning that it wasn't an addressbook with comments that was developed in a weekend. There's nothing wrong with their marketing and PR. The only issue is that they believed their own hype, and really embarrassed themselves with a totally useless product. Now, a year later, it's a little bit better, but it's no Basecamp and no Backpack.
      - DaniFong 18y ago
        I should just mention Amy, that I love your work. Twistori is so cool. But my point is mostly that, despite the bullshit, Mathematica is radically more powerful for building user interfaces (up to a certain complexity) than anything I've seen. The self-hype hasn't exactly toned down over time either, so I'm less certain it's really the bad omen you make of it.
Zak 18y ago
The point, I think is that it's entirely too much bloody work to make a GUI using any of the tools that are common for that purpose. I recently wrote a little utility[0] (under 200 lines) in Clojure to make a folder of images greyscale. Over half the code was GUI-related. The GUI consists of a single button that launches a file chooser, a text display of files processed / files to process and an error dialog that pops up in the event of an uncaught exception. I know Swing isn't a shining example of concise code, but it's absurd that there should be so much bulk for such a simple thing. [0] http://github.com/zakwilson/imagesieve/tree/master http://github.com/zakwilson/imagesieve/tree/master

DaniFong 18y ago

The marketing message is pervasive about everything Wolfram. It gets on my nerves a bit, too. However it doesn't detract much from the information. Once I sat down and started actually using Mathematica 7, my mind was totally blown.

ph0rque 18y ago
> Once I sat down and started actually using Mathematica 7, my mind was totally blown. Unfortunately, 99.999...% of us can't ever reach this point, due to the cost of mathematica.
- DaniFong 18y ago
  The student version costs $45, which is as much as a textbook, and less than one hundredth the cost of most semesters at American colleges.
  - ph0rque 18y ago
    If I understand the student licensing correctly, you can only use it for educational purposes, and only as long as you're a student. edit: also, the price is $140 for the student version: http://store.wolfram.com/view/app/mathforstudents/ http://store.wolfram.com/view/app/mathforstudents/
    - DaniFong 18y ago
      Sorry, I meant it's $45 for a semester.
      - ph0rque 18y ago
        Didn't mean to get on this pricing quibble... as someone who modeled an H atom ab initio in solid-state physics class using Mathematica, I really like it, too. However, it is my firm belief that unless they make a free version available eventually [1], only a select few will get to play with it and use it to make new discoveries/progress. 1. Or someone makes an ad-supported web2.0 social-network version of it :~).