I own the book, and I enjoyed at least some parts of it. Primitive cellular automata classification also had some scientific merit, and now widely cited. It could be shorter and/or probably better structured as a series of blog posts, but it doesn’t deserve such vitriol, in my opinion.

I remember this book + I own it. It is a very good book but way over my head. (Additionally, it serves well as a doorstop).

Still I admire the amount of diligence and energy that went into this. Wolfram spent several years _obsessed_ with this stuff. See his 2012 blogpost about his "quantified self" recordings: https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analyti...

Maybe A New Kind of Science will create a surge sometime (just like Neural Networks were declared dead for several years, then Deep Learning came along and they took off)

This blog post isn't by Stephen Wolfram, it's Jon McLoone.

Still better than anything you or I will ever write.

Are you sure he wrote it? Rumor has it that Wolfram had his grad students/postdocs write Mathematica and is essentially trampling on their backs making money off of it now.

Wolfram is not some sort of demigod.