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Wolfram Language has much more functionality than what existed in Mathematica, so it remains to be seen if it will have applicability outside of toy problems. S

by _Adam 13y ago

Wolfram Language has much more functionality than what existed in Mathematica, so it remains to be seen if it will have applicability outside of toy problems. So, it isn't fair to judge it solely on the merits of Mathematica. Also, social conventions are exactly that - conventions implicitly or explicitly chosen by a group of people. That group of people does not encompass the entire population of the planet. Hence, there is no reason to assume that your either your or Linus Torvalds' social conventions apply to anyone outside of you or him. I see no reason why he shouldn't name is work after himself. Is it bad marketing? I don't think so - Wolfram's name is a strong brand.

primitivesuave 13y ago
You make an excellent point about social convention, and I completely agree. However, one important thing to note is that SW is not involved with core Mathematica development, he does research and remotely manages his company. He suggests high level features that are then implemented by the kernel team (which I was on). One incredibly annoying aspect of this bureaucratic development process is that you never know when your kernel project will get killed by someone higher up the food chain. Obviously, this happens at many companies, but when it happens as often as it did when I was there, you see key employees leaving a lot more often than you do elsewhere. It's worth pointing out that the architecture of Mathematica was designed by Stephen, and in my experience with other large software projects, it is by far the most elegant and well-designed. Reading the original code base gives every developer a great appreciation for the genius of Stephen Wolfram, who is a completely self-taught computer scientist. So he definitely deserves credit for what the language is today, because if he hadn't planned that far ahead and realized the need for a general purpose computing platform, the pace at which the Mathematica team can add new features would not be nearly as fast.

by _Adam 13y ago

primitivesuave 13y ago

You make an excellent point about social convention, and I completely agree. However, one important thing to note is that SW is not involved with core Mathematica development, he does research and remotely manages his company. He suggests high level features that are then implemented by the kernel team (which I was on). One incredibly annoying aspect of this bureaucratic development process is that you never know when your kernel project will get killed by someone higher up the food chain. Obviously, this happens at many companies, but when it happens as often as it did when I was there, you see key employees leaving a lot more often than you do elsewhere. It's worth pointing out that the architecture of Mathematica was designed by Stephen, and in my experience with other large software projects, it is by far the most elegant and well-designed. Reading the original code base gives every developer a great appreciation for the genius of Stephen Wolfram, who is a completely self-taught computer scientist. So he definitely deserves credit for what the language is today, because if he hadn't planned that far ahead and realized the need for a general purpose computing platform, the pace at which the Mathematica team can add new features would not be nearly as fast.