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Comment by techdragon | Hacker News Reader

As much as I admire the power behind the “wolfram language”, it’s just never going to be open sourced, never going to really be available for a hobbyist to learn, never viable for a startup to build their entire data analysis core value on top of, its just never going to happen… Stephen Wolfram would die before he gave up control, the entire thing is his precious child. His track record at Wolfram Research is well established.

Mathematica could be so much more, but basically until Stephen dies, it will remain an academic mathematical tool. It’s a complete coin flip as to when he dies the company will collapse or thrive, but it’s just so far away from anything they have plans for at the moment that it’s just impossible to guess.

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> Stephen Wolfram would die before he gave up control, the entire thing is his precious child.

I understand that Wolfram made unrealistic agreements with the original programmers, incompatible with growing a large organization to support his evolving vision for Mathematica. Rather than renegotiating, he attempted a maneuver that did not survive a court challenge. The original programmers are now rich.

I cannot find any account of this on the web. There's an unrelated "Fields medalist car accident" that I again know from first-hand accounts, that also has no trace on the web. Huh.

Interesting. I do recall that quite a few years ago I happened to talk with one of the original programmers (I won't say their name here, though I remember it), who complained that Wolfram had basically stolen from them. That must have been before the court victory.

So if anyone's wondering, this post does seem to be based on something, even if it's not easily verifiable.

Yes, surely they would have told you had they lost. Instead, silence and a change in spending habits.

I don't know here that "not easily verifiable" is deliberate, but it could be.

In the case of the Fields Medalist, one can read in major publications that they engaged a PR firm. Those articles don't specifically spell out sanitizing the web. If one already knows every detail of the event in question (in my case, confirmation includes overhearing him express concerns about a wrongful death lawsuit), an internet search finds many accounts relaying a cover story, and a single forum comment that correctly describes the event. That comment was apparently beyond the PR firm's reach.

What about web archiving services? Do these sanitizing PR maneuvers take those down as well? That’d be an alarming revelation to me.

So who is the fields medalist? Interestingly a Google search didn't find that. I'm guessing they were somehow at fault or were drinking. I'm sure if I ever had a car accident where I hurt someone or I was drunk or something, I'd be ashamed, horrified and probably not want anyone to know. But because I'm a nobody, nobody would care. If I was the greatest engineer ever it might be on everything written about me in the future, which would be really horrible in a way. But if this person did something dangerous it shouldn't necessarily remain a secret. The problem with these things is powerful people can block discussion of them by threatening lawsuits.

> hobbyist

At least there's a minimized version in Raspbian. It ran fine on an old B model, snappy enough to play around.

https://www.wolfram.com/raspberry-pi/

The Home version is surprisingly cheap. I became so reliant on Mathematica from my student days that I just have to buy the Home version after graduation.

> never going to really be available for a hobbyist to learn

That's not true: here is the pricing for the Home and Hobby licenses:

> https://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/pricing/home-hobby/

These prices are not cheap, but affordable if you are serious about your hobby.

> it’s just never going to be open sourced

Mathematica is a prime, tender and juicy target for modern reverse engineering tools.

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