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Comment by alanctgardner2 | Hacker News Reader

Stephen Wolfram is definitely an amazing guy, but I find his writing so obnoxious. He's like Steve Jobs, but promoting himself, basically. It's really cool what he's done, but there's no discussion of the state of the art, or similar projects. Everything is being done for the first time ever, and it can only be done using Mathematica.

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to me this appears to have been written by Theodore Gray, did I read the same thing you did?

You're entirely right, I was mistaken about the author. It sounds similar to a Stephen Wolfram post though; these guys really, really love Mathematica (understandably), and every post goes to great lengths to explain how they've done something incredibly novel which was only possible because Mathematica is fast and versatile, etc. The end result was really impressive, and I know they got there using Mathematica (in some cases), but I was more interested in the techniques and the approach they took than the particular language they used. All of the puffery and going out of the way to talk about how terse the code was seems excessive.

The blog post is at Wolfram Research's web site. Of course it is going to promote Mathematica, which is actually great software, too.

When you look at a photo essay on Canon or Nikon's website, it promotes the features of their (very good) cameras as well as showcasing excellent photography. Don't dismiss the valuable content that these corporate-sponsored posts give you just because they have an agenda.

Definitely written by Mr. Gray.

That being said, Stephen Wolfram is surely at least a little pompous...

Completely unrelated to the post here. Also, that a Mathematica co-founder would promote Mathematica is hardly surprising.

You guys are also being unfair: this is a good post with lots of useful content.

Can you point out some of Steve Jobs' writing that is heavily self promotional like Wolfram's?

I wasn't saying Steve Jobs was self-promotional like Wolfram, but a lot of Apple reveals involved 'incredible, never-before-seen' sorts of language. Language like "as far as I know we're the first people to ever do this" seems like the kind of thing Steve would say about a product; these guys are just applying it to a project they worked on.

If I'm honest, I'm probably just very cynical about any sort of salesmanship.

Probably. People act like apple was the first company to perfect their marketing and message, maybe they were, but it's completely acceptable to me that a company would want to optimize how they present their products.

Most of us are just jealous of how successful they've become, which is also not unexpected. Wolfram, however, could work on sounding a bit more humble in selling himself.

> Most of us are just jealous of how successful they've become

says who?

If only they did this for Pixar films and then you could've said that Steve actually had a hand in this...... ;)

Well I mean he did invent cellular automata.

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