A World Run with Code
I find Stephen Wolfram to be a an interesting person. On one hand, he is undeniably exceptional and created an impressive computational system. On the other hand, the "Wolfram language" is really a pretty poor design as far as programming languages go, and would not even be noticed if it wasn't for the giant standard library that gets shipped with it, called Mathematica. I use the "Wolfram language" because I have to, not because I want to.<p>In other words, if I could easily use the Mathematica library from Clojure, I wouldn't give the Wolfram Language a second glance. I can't think of even a single language aspect that would tempt me to use the Wolfram Language [context: I've been a Mathematica user since 1993] over Clojure. I have (much) better data structures, a consistent library for dealing with them, transducers, core.async, good support for parallel computation, pattern matching through core.match, and finally a decent programming interface with a REPL, which I can use from an editor that does paren-matching for me (ever tried to debug a complex Mathematica expression with mismatched parens/brackets/braces?).<p>This is why the man is a contradiction: his thoughts are undeniably interesting, but his focus and anchoring in the "Wolfram Language" is jarring.