
The time before Mathematica (2013) - geyang
http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2013/06/there-was-a-time-before-mathematica/
======
mnl
I like Mathematica quite a bit (the Front End/Kernel makes a lot of sense),
but I don't really like Wolfram after he left Physics. The way he downplays
Reduce, Macsyma (Maxima), the pioneering work that was Veltman's Schoonschip
and then FORM... He doesn't even mention the folks at Maple. Computer Algebra
was a well established field way before Mathematica appeared in 1988[1]. He's
smart and very good at selling his product, that's fine, and for a long time
his company has had the resources to hire a lot of good people and you can
tell/take advantage of it when using Mathematica. But honestly, I think we
could do without.

Personally, I find more interesting David R. Stoutmeyer, who made the first
CAS for microcomputers in the late 70s, muMath for CP/M, and then the tiny
PICOMATH-80 for the TRS-80. He went on to write Derive, that was much loved in
the early 90s, because it was very good and you could afford it while
Mathematica has always been expensive and for some years (until version 2.2
really) you needed either a souped- up Macintosh or a workstation to run it.
Then Texas Instruments hired him in order to develop the Derive-based TI-92/89
(Derive was written in Lisp, its version for those in C BTW) and ended up
buying Soft Warehouse and shutting Derive for good... which is just sad and
nobody cares.

I'd like to ask for some love for Reduce, now open sourced and hosted at
SourceForge -not cool any more, but it lives there-. It still makes a few
calculations easier than Mathematica.

[1] See for instance this very interesting review of the early Mathematica:
[http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~fateman/papers/mma.review.pdf](http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~fateman/papers/mma.review.pdf)

~~~
ska
He was much the same about his scientific work as I recall, it's standard
Wolfram M.O. : discount, ignore, or attempt to outright claim credit for the
fundamental work of others (preferably without mentioning them by name) while
puffing up your own contributions.

It's an unfortunate and deep character flaw, but he still has made some
interesting contributions that are worth evaluating on their own merits
(neither as fundamental nor as impactful as he would suggest, typically)

~~~
ssivark
I do not have a personal grouse against Wolfram, but it takes a level of self-
importance to (re)name every product of your company after yourself, even if
you might be coming up with some key ideas and the vision. Eg: Wolfram Alpha,
Mathematica --> Wolfram Language, etc.

It seems wrong for him to take sole credit for what I'm guessing a talented
and hard-working team at Mathematica has achieved together, over the years.

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codeulike
Modesty is not his strong point, but if you've never played with Mathematica,
have a play with it - the way it works is very interesting.

~~~
zitterbewegung
Mathematica / Wolfram Language I would describe as you take the idea of
M-expressions from John Mccarthy's paper and program nearly every single
Mathematical algorithm that you can think of.

For instance you can do these things without calling an external library or
datasource:

Classify some data using the examples. Oh yea the text is included in the
program or automatically downloaded. Also you don't have to choose a model for
this classification step it just attempts to classify based on the
preprogrammed models. Accept user input to classify the unknown. (Yea it has
its own UI code).Deploy to the cloud (this is sort of in beta but it works).
Export your notebook to latex / a slideshow once you have submitted your work
to someone so you can explain it.

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oneJob
In the time before Mathematica, mathermatics was non-proprietary and open
source.

~~~
hga
No so in the case of Macsyma and Wolfram's own SMP
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wolfram#Symbolic_Manip...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wolfram#Symbolic_Manipulation_Program)):
" _Wolfram led the development of the computer algebra system SMP (Symbolic
Manipulation Program) in the Caltech physics department during 1979–1981. A
dispute with the administration over the intellectual property rights
regarding SMP—patents, copyright, and faculty involvement in commercial
ventures—eventually caused him to resign from Caltech._

It's not infamous enough, but Symbolics managed to arrange to solely license
Macsyma, as far as we could tell to keep it out of everyone else's hands.
Wikipedia seems to be accurate in this section:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macsyma#Commercialization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macsyma#Commercialization)
based on my communications with Danny Hillis after the sole licencing when I
was working for LMI (which also was selling SMP), working for Gold Hill in
1984, and working for Joel Moses in the late '80s (he was indeed none too
happy about how MIT had treated him WRT to Macsyma).

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psychometry
At this point, I'm pretty sure a list of Stephen Wolfram's favorite pie
recipes would begin with a history of his childhood academic accomplishments.
It's almost nauseating reading this crap.

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kyberias
There's an invitation to solve a puzzle hidden in this text. Has it been
solved yet?

~~~
mayoff
I hope nobody solves it "just for fun" without a promise from Wolfram to free
the decrypted SMP source code.

