It kills me how time and again Wolfram writes self-aggrandizing, egotistical articles filled with glib little self-promotional asides, yet so many people seem to jump in to defend him.<p>The Ada Lovelace article he wrote a while back was really egregious, littering it with comparisons to his Wolfram products, talking about how he had seen further than Babbage because of his cellular automata work. Ugh. So detestable.<p>Every time there is a Wolfram post, people rightfully point out his pedantic and self-selling attitude, then other people either argue they didn&#x27;t perceive it that way, or that they are tired of hearing about it and prefer to bash the people doing the important work of calling Wolfram on it instead of bashing Wolfram himself for it.<p>I&#x27;d go further and argue that &quot;What if Ramanujan had had Mathematica?&quot; is ludicrous to appear in an essay like this. It&#x27;s obviously meant to privilege Wolfram&#x27;s own products and position them as if they could empower productive and once-in-a-lifetime talented mathematicians, when really few such people would get value from a tool like Mathematica, and who is to say that Ramanujan wouldn&#x27;t be a supporter of FOSS and boisterously argue that no one should use Mathematica and instead use FOSS tools that approximate it?<p>It&#x27;s not reasonable to defend Wolfram on this account by saying of course he will promote his own products, or that he could have promoted them even more but chose not to. That&#x27;s not reasonable because he is setting out to write a historical essay, not a puff piece, it&#x27;s not about him or his products. Shoehorning them in has no place and it&#x27;s not forgivable just because &quot;people plug their own products&quot; or something. If you want to plug your products, write a puff piece about your products, not a historical essay.