Mathematica is used by a lot in academia, and you'll find it cited in Methods section often. I personally know a lot of incredibly talented and prolific physicists who swear by it, and have used it to get very good work done.
The only innovation I see here is an unusual attention to constructing visual representations and using them as identifiers in code. Which is cool! But insisting it's new demeans the work of thousands of engineers who do similar and prerequisite work, and who make an effort to situate their work in literature and indusrtry rather than insisting on some kind of exceptionalism.
Arrogance should be called out in every instance, because it's not actually a route to greatest impact.
The question I’d ask those physicists is whether Mathematica does the kinds of things Wolfram claims for it / does things other programming languages can’t do. I wouldn’t be surprised if the answer was “yes,” I’m just not sure.
This is coming from a pythonista btw. To each their own. Python is a better scripting language, but Mathematica is a better analysis language for a lot of things. Python is catching up in a lot of ways though with Numpy and Tensorflow. I'd say Python's Tensorflow is a lot more mature than Mathematica's neural nets, but Mathematica's symbolic math seems to be world class.
> It’s only recently that I’ve begun to properly internalize just how broad the implications of having a computational language really are—even though, ironically, I’ve spent much of my life engaged precisely in the consuming task of building the world’s only large-scale computational language.
I guess the rest of us will just need to muddle through with the (apparently) small-scale (non?)-computational languages that we use.
I think that might be a little unfair. Wolfram's certainly more articulate in his egotism, but nobody matches The Donald for sheer volume:
"I understand things, I comprehend very well. Ok? Better than, I think, almost anybody."
Mathematica/Wolfram Language is a perfectly fine programming language. It has an amazing standard library. It's definitely worth the money (if you're working in a field that benefits from it). But that's it. Don't call it a computational language. It isn't a new way of thinking. It isn't revolutionary, there is literally nothing in Mathematica that can't be done in another language just as easily (except the CAS engine is world leading). But somehow these mundane blog posts by Stephen Wolfram make it to the front page of HN every few months, so someone must be upvoting them.
So maybe his hype machine is working as intended- he is in charge of a successful company and I'm hiding anonymously behind a keyboard. So what if a few people don't like his attitude, he's more successful than most of us.