Stephen Wolfram – re:Clojure Keynote [video]
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He called me naïve, said that my question was childish, then asked for the next question.
If dunking on a 23 year old makes him feel good about himself, so be it. I couldn’t imagine working anywhere near him.
I wonder what he does behind closed doors.
As self absorbed as wolfrsam is it's obvious what's going on. There is NOTHING hypocritical about it. He wants to profit off of his own wolfram language. But at the same time he appreciates the ideals, benefits and other great things that come out of OSS.
It's like the video game industry. Let me put it this way, if Closed source didn't exist video games at the triple A level likely wouldn't exist. If open source didn't exist, linux likely wouldn't exist either. Both are good.
But I don't have to explain this to you. We all are aware of this on some level. Everyone and I mean everyone literally knows what I just said.
Wolfram talking about the good parts of OSS doesn't justify some ass hole from the audience subtly trying to call him a hypocrite with a targeted question like that because BOTH closed source and open source are good. Wolframs response was justified there was no need for him to spend extra time explaining something that's totally obvious to someone who not only already knows the answer but is only asking the question for nefarious reasons.
Or he could be rude and all I hear is "because I'm a hypocrite and not a great guy."
You can answer to justify your decisions without being a jerk. Even if it's a jerk trying to get a rise out of you who does it. If you're the honored guest speaker with everyone competing to kiss your wealthy, famous backside your jerkdom isn't really equivalent to a student asking what appears to be a stunningly obvious question that we don't even know how it was phrased.
But maybe I'm so naieve to have seen people respond in a reasonable way to aggressive questions from the floor often enough makes me think it's the right way to go.
He could've but the GP knew he was starting shit by asking that question. Don't expect people to take the high path when you're trying to mess with them. Seriously, if a cop is about to arrest you and you spit in his face don't be surprised when the cop knocks your teeth out when nobody is looking.
>You can answer to justify your decisions without being a jerk
Definitely. The problem here was GP was being a jerk and trying to make wolfram look bad by inciting a reaction. He succeeded but who really is the true ass hole here?
>But maybe I'm so naieve to have seen people respond in a reasonable way
Sure those people who respond that way are socially savvy. They know how to manipulate the situation to make themselves look good. Wolfram CLEARLY is not that type of person. But does that make him an ass? Nah. Shutting down a jerk who asks a insidious question like that is not the best response but it's an appropriate one. An eye for an eye.
1)Stephen Wolfram is not a police officer and has not been spat at in the face.
2) You don't know the tone of the question and neither do I. The question is obvious and expected and deserves an answer in such a context.
>1)Stephen Wolfram is not a police officer and has not been spat at in the face.
That's right I hold stephen to less of a standard than police officers. Police officers should uphold a law and stay neutral. If you're not a police officer and someone insults you, there's no need to stay neutral. A retort in return to an insult is 100% viable.
>2) You don't know the tone of the question and neither do I. The question is obvious and expected and deserves an answer in such a context.
The true intent of the question can be deduced from the content of the question itself. The tone is irrelevant in that case. The answer to the question as I repeatedly said is obvious so the question was asked not for an answer... the question was asked as a deliberate attack. That is the only logical explanation given that the answer to the question is 100% known by the asker.
An attack DOES NOT DESERVE an answer.
In fact any additional tonality that went along with the question would be manipulative. The asker can use deceptive tonality to disguise the question as innocent but we know clearly from the content of the question that it is an attack despite the tonality.
Everyone and I mean everyone knows why mathematica and windows is closed source. There is ZERO need to ask such a question; that is unless your intentions are insidious.
Nope. Neither you, nor I, nor anyone knows why any other person has made a complex decision unless they say, and even then we're assuming they're being honest and sometimes people lie for PR! [1]
I'm of the opinion that anyone turning up to speak at a licensing conference and refusing to talk about the licensing of their own stuff is heroically silly. I mean just wow. Anyone not anticipating being questioned about their licensing in an open question time or who can't handle an "attack" at a percieved disconnect between words and actions about licensing at a licensing conference probably shouldn't be there or indeed out in public. Responding with no substance and a personal slur (which is what is reported here, but I haven't confirmed) is really, really, weak and poor at best.
[1] For example Wolfram's company isn't listed and he can't spend the money he has made, making a very different decision framework for him from the CEO of microsoft, beholdent to the board representing the shareholders. Which was also the framework that made Solaris into OpenSolaris, arguably far too late to preserve SUN wealth. These are difficult and complex decisions that people are very sure of and frequently get very wrong even from a pure wealth-maximisation standpoint.
As you grow older, you look back and maybe there’s something to be learned from an exchange. And it usually doesn’t favor oneself.
And like, while I generally think OSS == good, there's lots of software that I think doesn't need to be (or even shouldn't be) OSS, but I have coherent reasons for that.
Indeed the overall project seems quite fine, but I think it has no chance of getting near Wolfram's aspirations due to its closed nature. It's just a really big proposition that couldn't fit a project like this. (If I recall correctly Wolfram described it himself as the equivalent of Google but storing all structured data of the world within). Google can do it because they don't make many promises on their data. But clearly they seem to want to make promises (i.e. structure) the data, so data collection and data cleaning might need manual curation (even with deep learning advances) which is just fit for a communitarian effort. A single company can't have experts in all fields curating datasets of everything, can it? (and if it can, should it?)
Knowing what you did... trying to humiliate him in front of a crowd I'm glad he dunked on you. I can't imagine working with some young person who thinks he's smart trying to humiliate and overshadow someone for no reason.
Call you niave? Yeah, you were niave.
It's possible to both like OSS, and not want to open-source a particular work for legitimate reasons.
Mr. Wolfram could have responded with those reasons. Bizarrely, he, like you, took it as an attack and responded unnecessarily rudely.
I assume that you, like the GP, is human and of average human intelligence. So you can deduce several facts from this scenario. First of all... ALL of the REASONS for why someone would develop closed source software ARE COMPLETELY OBVIOUS. I know about the reasons, you know about those reasons, the audience knows about those reasons and the question asker 100% knows about those reasons. NOTHING needs to be explained. Why does microsoft keep windows closed source? Is the concept really that foreign to you? Why don't you ask that question to the CEO of microsoft? Send him an email because it's something you truly wonder about!
It's so Bizarre that you're not aware of the why windows or mathematica is closed source! See what I did there? Nothing is truly bizarre here it's just me imitating your manipulative language.
No what's really going on is you're taking a side and you're arguing for your team OSS despite the fact that you're aware of the insidiousness of asking this question to wolfram himself. Don't take sides, don't call people bizarre. Stay logical and argue for the situation at hand is my advice to you.
Anyway, From all of this, logically, you can derive the fact that the GP didn't ask that question to ascertain an answer BECAUSE the answer is obvious and HE ALREADY KNOWS THE ANSWER. The only other reason why he would ask a question like that is to start drama. He got drama, but likely didn't expect for the tables to be turned and get his own ass humiliated.
Mr. Wolfram 100% could have responded with the reasons I mentioned and those reasons would have been the better answer it would have made him look more mature and not ignite the wrath of the man who asked the question. But obviously Mr. Wolfram isn't a person I would consider socially savy so he took offense to an insult that was disguised as a question and responded in kind... which is not the best/smartest answer, but an appropriate one.
I agree, but the fact he's attracted a brilliant team to him and kept his company stable and productive for decades means he's doing something right.
He's a mystery I've been wondering about since forever.
With the wolfram language he wants to make a larger and larger libraries and try to make it more of a general purpose language but it has similar problems that lisp has but also that it’s really only targeting academia. I tried to use the cloud version but it never was really useful.
With wolfram alpha it was interesting to use but now Google can perform most of what that does now
The biggest problem with the language is that it’s extremely hard to learn and mathematicians are moving off of the platform.
This is probably a good thing overall, seeing this juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane.
Both times I signed up for the service, I canceled after a few months because I didn’t have a real use case.
Ten years ago, I experimented with my own Clojure to Wolfram Language bindings https://github.com/mark-watson/clojure_wolfram_alpha
He was super down to earth and kind, even though it was obvious to both of us that he was completely out of my league.
I saw him give a talk at SXSW and deal very patiently with idiots in the crowd that were using the q & a session to score cheap political points.
Overall, I was pretty impressed with the man. Much smarter than I'll ever be.
What's the state of the art on sentiment analysis? Is it more or less reliable these days? :-)
Sorry, I couldn't read your comment because it was grayed out :)
> I am persuaded that no one ever achieves anything worth-while in this world unless he has so great a respect for his work that he compels all other men to respect it.
Apparently this comes from an article published in 1922 by an anonymous author.
edit: watching it.. SMP, Wolfram, computational language, he did all of that for past 40 years of course, he even managed to put himself in the same sentence as John McCarthy, they invented notebooks and then he's showcasing Mathematica/notebook.. I actually quite like Wolfram, but sometimes he's just a tad too much.
In other words, I doubt the only thing Clojure folks care about is Clojure.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macsyma
[1] https://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/smp-symbolic-man...
Perhaps he should have accentuated the Lispyness of it though.
Guess what: it is much.
I'm pretty sure I'd never use it for anything but one thing that caught my eye is how easy it is to generate mock data. E.g. WordList
Most of people in tech do not use Mathematica but I would put a lot of chips on a bet that most heard of it. That's why I'm courious
At +10:06:00, he starts talking a bit about clojure. 26 minutes into his presentation at a clojure conference and he talks about clojure for well under 2 minutes, most of which was analyzing the text on the wikipedia page for clojure...
At +10:16, he then very briefly demos a linkage from the clojure repl into the Wolfram Engine, which is arguably the only part that's specifically interesting to most conference watchers.
If this were a keynote at a Wolfram conference, it would have been a better fit than as a keynote at a Clojure conference.
But in fact the long term decline Google Trends gives for Mathematica and Clojure also shows for plenty of other languages, including mainstream ones such as JavaScript and Java.
I'm not sure what the explanation is, but I'd be wary of relying on Google Trends to make predictions about the life expectancy of any particular language.