
Stephen Wolfram On Starting a Long-Term Company - wslh
http://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/recent/ycombinatorschool/
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cool-RR
Off-topic: I wonder when Wolfram engineers will discover the technology of
Redo (a.k.a. Ctrl-Y,) so I won't have to be mortally afraid of hitting Ctrl-Z
and losing my work every time I work with Wolfram Mathematica.

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fragsworth
Some of the stuff Wolfram worked on was neat, but I really don't care for the
self-aggrandizing tone of everything he writes. He comes off as having a nasty
superiority complex.

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pavlov
Steve Jobs also uses words like "revolutionary" and "magical" when talking
about his own work. Why can't Stephen Wolfram get a pass?

Personally I appreciate that Stephen Wolfram tries to talk about his work in a
larger context and using terms that even a layperson can understand, rather
than hiding behind specialist jargon and the false modesty of a traditional
expert persona.

He may not be right about computational program-space mining becoming a
trillion-dollar industry, but he's brave enough to frame his long-term
enthusiasm in these terms. What's the worst that can happen? If it eventually
turned out that he was right, he'd certainly be remembered. If he's wrong, no
big deal -- it doesn't take anything away from his accomplishments as a
programmer and CEO.

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Iv
Steve Jobs doesn't have a pass either and is annoying as hell.

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bigtones
What was the company he talked about that IPO'ed ?

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brudgers
I believe it was Computer Mathematics which originally developed SMP (Symbolic
Manipulation Program). SMP was one of the first commercial products designed
to solve abstract mathematical problems, and is generally considered the
forerunner to Mathematica. My father used it extensively while working for the
DoD back in the 80's and 90's and was a huge fan.

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ececconi
I think one of the things that makes Stephen Wolfram so talented is his
philosophical approach to solving problems. That, combined with his technical
ability has been able to create some really great stuff.

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rphlx
With luck, one day Stephen Wolfram will discover how to write paragraphs with
more than 2 sentences, on average. This technology will completely
revolutionize the way humans communicate with Stephen Wolfram.

He could have easily spent his entire life writing 2 sentence paragraphs. Or
he could have delegated his writing to someone else.

But that surely would have introduced errors. With his new discovery, his deep
and unique ideas may finally become more accessible to the rest of us.

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nerdo
A modern-day Howard Roarke.

