Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Controversy about Software in Higher Ed

here and a reply here

1 comment:

ac said...

Most of Gray's reply is pretty good, although I have to say I find most of the Wolfram stuff nauseatingly sales-pitchy in tone. For example:

"Mathematica is a powerful, deep and life-changing creation ... [that] .. powerfully alters your relationship to computation."

A bit gushy, probably a fair statement about computational symbolic algebra systems in general, but Mathematica is just one example, and IMHO not the best.

Gray's paper reads as though Mathematica is in some way unique - let's just say I'm not yet convinced that anything that has come out of the Wolfram enterprise in the past decade or two is particularly original.