I know SW is famous for his arrogance/egotism, but it still kills me how he always discusses everything in terms of Mathematica's programming language, instead of mathematical notation or pseudo-code. It's like giving a linguistics lecture using the made-up language you invented with your twin.
I don't think your criticism is very accurate here. Wolfram Language code doesn't show up until the second half of the (very long) article, in the sections where he is explaining how to represent the mathematical concepts in the Wolfram Language. In fact, in several cases he mentions the traditional mathematical notation and follows it with the Wolfram Language notation. What's strange or arrogant or egotistical about this? Yes, he's the founder and CEO of the company that created the language, but that doesn't strike me as a problem. It's a good language for doing this sort of thing, and it's pretty clear that he's genuinely interested in both the mathematical concepts and how to create a programming language to represent them. This is hardly just content marketing blogspam.
Every single piece Wolfram writes, without exception, is arrogant content marketing blogspam. Even his books. Sometimes very clever, sometimes interesting (though I'd find him 1,000x more interesting if say 1 article in 10 made no mention of how clever he and Mathematica are); always arrogant and self-promotional. This piece is no exception - because it's Turing I made exception to my usual personal hard-ban on reading Wolfram. It's no exception to the above. It is, however, interesting despite being arrogant and self-promotional.
If you asked Stephen Wolfram what time it was, he would be arrogant and self-promotional, and mention Mathematica at least as much as the time.
It’s definitely self-promotion, but I don’t see why this is a bad thing. He’s clearly spent a large portion of his life developing a programming and computing environment to handle mathematics (and other things). What is he supposed to do? Write a blog post about something he's interested in, without using the programming language he has intentionally developed to deal with the things he’s interested in?
> So, OK, if I mounted a project to try to find the fundamental theory of physics, what would I actually do? It’s a complex project, that’ll need not just me, but a diverse team of talented other people too.
It's illuminating that, in order to explore the nature of space and time, he mentions Euclid, Einstein, but most of all himself and his work. The self-absorption encompasses all of existence.
That said, dismissing all of his writing as "arrogant content marketing blogspam" feels uncharitable and too reductive - I don't disagree, but still consider it arrogant self-promotion of the highest order, by one of the most productive and insightful thinkers of our time.
You manage to neatly encapsulate why I find him so frustrating.
"feels uncharitable and too reductive"
I'm old enough to remember when the law suits, a flagged throwaway comment briefly mentions, were going - my recollection is of a lengthy effort to deprive the other developers of the fruits of Mathematica labours. That colours later impressions. Charitable isn't necessarily always the right take...
Still, that's an aside here, and perhaps I was too sweeping. It's difficult as there are rare times, like this one, where the topic is fascinating and well explored, and the self-promotion is, for Stephen, light touch. It's well known he was a child prodigy, so I'm sure many people and events had part in boosting his ego and innate sense of exceptionalism, resulting in the personality we know. So I don't entirely blame him for it...
"arrogant self-promotion of the highest order, by one of the most productive and insightful thinkers of our time."
You're not wrong. He'd probably be well served employing someone to bring a lighter touch, via an editing pass to all output. I end up not finishing articles he writes on topics I might otherwise find hugely interesting. Solely because too much prose is spent telling me he's brilliant, rather than simply showing it. For me at least, the style of delivery has cost the message - as I stopped regularly reading him as far too frustrating, ages ago. :)
Ehhh, you know, he's not a journalist. He's the founder and CEO of a company that he is very hands on at. What you view as arrogance and self-promotion is really just a man who is obsessed with the technology he builds and works on every single day. No one is forcing you to read his stuff or pay attention to him.
I found his relentless self-promotion really distracting and annoying. And presenting lambda calculus in terms of his own language only makes it more confusing.
However, I am impressed with the tenacity it took to trace the paper to its origin and there's a lot of interesting story in the process.
This seems unsurprising to me. Presumably the language he designed fits his way of thinking, and he uses it to express his thoughts.
As long as you still understand it he succeeded in using it to communicate, and with some people that's a lot better than them not communicating at all because they have to use someone else's language.
If someone comes up with an amazing construct in an invented language and gets any outside eyeballs on it that can understand it, someone will transcribe it into a more common notation anyways.
“Made-up language” is a bit harsh. The Mathematica company has hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue, right? It makes sense for his public communications to use it, just like you’d expect to see the guy who wrote Haskell to give examples in Haskell.
Have a look at this page [1]. Mathematica is exceptionally powerful and has a very rich vocabulary. In so far as expressing ideas across the computational paradigms - you will struggle to find a match.
It's just a pity that its grammar/syntax is unintuitive to people who come from conventional programming languages.
