…because nothing says “stable platform for mission-critical applications” like “from the makers of Mathematica!”

Carl Zimmer linked to this VentureBeat piece on Wolfram Language with the remark, “Always interesting to hear what Stephen Wolfram is up to. But this single-source style of tech reporting? Ugh.” I’d go further: the software may well eventually provide an advance in some respect, but the reporting is so bad, we’d never know.

We’re told “a developer can use some natural language.” What, like the GOTO command? That’s English. Shakespearean, even. (“Go to, I’ll no more on’t; it hath made me mad.” Hamlet, act 3, scene 1.) We’re told that “literally anything” will be “usable and malleable as a symbolic expression”—wasn’t that the idea behind LISP? We’re told, awkwardly, that “Questions in a search engine have many answers,” with the implication that this is a bad thing (and that Wolfram Alpha solved that problem). We are informed that “instead of programs being tens of thousands of lines of code, they’re 20 or 200.” Visual Basic could claim much the same. We don’t push functionality “out to libraries and modules”; we use the Wolfram Cloud. It’s very different!

(Mark Chu-Carroll points out, “What’s scary is that he thinks that not pushing things to libraries is good!”)

The “wink, wink, we’re not not comparing Wolfram to Einstein” got old within a sentence, too.

I have actual footage of Wolfram from the Q&A session of that presentation:

“I am my own reality check.” — Stephen Wolfram (1997)