zlacker

I'll be quite honest: I'm sure that Wolfram has made something truly, honestly amazing and perhaps even beautiful...to a geek. Much like one artist can appreciate the time and dedication required by another artist in creating a complex work, to the lay person it's still just random splotches of color.

In fact, reading this review I'm reminded of the article about Git and merge algorithms that was on the front page recently. In all likelihood, Alpha will be amazing at what it does, without anyone worrying whether what it does is what people want. Maybe people like Google because it's fast and reasonably accurate, and the human brain is still a really amazing filter once you narrow down the data set sufficiently.