It's Wolfram. If they didn't claim to invent something fundamental in the first paragraph, I'd immediately assume the site was hacked or it's a poorly timed April fools joke written by an intern.
My favorite example is when Caltech put out a press release about a young woman got her PhD and nearly beat Wolfram's record for youngest PhD from Caltech. He felt immediately compelled to write a long winded several-thousand word essay about how glad he is to still have the record for being the youngest PhD, by a full two weeks! And also, he wanted to remind everyone that he knew Richard Feynman. Cringe...
The Wikipedia article suggests a contemporary in 1987 (MathCAD) but I'm not seeing a Mathematica/Jupyter-style notebook interface before that year. That would seem to have been the year of the notebook interface, and Mathematica 1.0 did come out that year with one. As far as Wolfram claims go, this one doesn't seem too offensive.
I'm personally a fan of many ideas Wolfram pushes, just not a fan of the style they're pushed. I'd say I'm not in the minority, to the point it's a tired cliche.
It's unfortunate as clearly he has a huge amount to contribute. Maybe with an LLM someone can build a de-Stepheniser that takes in his pompous, smug text and outputs something more mellow and reasonable whilst keeping all the facts, which is what we are there for after all.
Jupyter notebooks were inspired by Mathematica notebooks: that's widely known and has been explicitly said in blog posts and elsewhere by the creators of Jupyter. It's no secret… And as the designer and developer of Mathematica notebooks I am flattered and honored that my ideas are now so widely used, even if it is in a product other than the one I wrote myself.
Time for a trip down memory lane. There were several notebook-adjacent products around at that time (1987) but none of them implemented notebooks as we know them today.
At the time I was using Xcode, which had a terminal-like interface that was a plain text document in which you could put all the shell commands you needed to build your app. This could include calls to the compiler, linker, or just any generic shell commands. To evaluate a given command (which could be one or more lines long) you had to manually select the exact range of text you wanted to run, which was kind of irritating. Any output would be placed directly below the input line. Because the document was pure plain text, it had no way of knowing what was input and what was output, or distinguish new output from old. So all the outputs accumulated, and you had to manually select and delete them periodically. It was an improvement over a glass teletype terminal interface, but I thought I could do better for Mathematica (code name Omega at the time).
The solution I came up with was to create a text document that was annotated with “zones” delimited by vertical bars along the right side of the screen (where cell brackets are now). Initially I used different black and white texture patterns on 4 or 5 pixel wide vertical bars. One texture for input and another texture for output.
This immediately gave two huge advantages: first, you didn’t have to manually select the range of a multi-line input. Just putting the cursor anywhere within an input zone and evaluating would evaluate the whole input. Second, because the system was keeping track of what was output, old output could be deleted automatically and replaced with new output.
Initially I called these things zones, but Steve Jobs suggested I use large close-square-bracket symbols instead of patterned bars, and think of them more like cells in a spreadsheet than like zones in a text document. Once you have brackets instead of bars, it’s immediately obvious that you could have larger brackets that encompass two or more cells. So I created cell groups, initially just to group input/output pairs, but of course it’s not a big leap to also have sections and subsections, then different cell types, styles, graphics cells, etc.
These key defining features of notebooks did not exist in any other system at the time, and to the best of my knowledge were not independently developed by other people. All the current notebook systems that share these broad features, definitely including Jupyter notebooks, derive from the original Mathematica notebooks I developed in 1987-8. (There are other styles of user interface, including some used by Maple and Matlab around the same time, that are called notebooks, but they did not share the key features I’ve described. They were and are fine products that I’m sure have both advantages and disadvantages compared to our Notebooks, but unlike our Notebooks, they are not the precursors of Jupyter.)
So can Stephen Wolfram personally claim to have invented notebooks? No, and he doesn’t: he claims that Wolfram Research did, which is true, since I was one of the co-founders of that company, and I invented that form of notebook.
Theodore
Item #8 at https://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/scrapbook/
""""
1987: The Mathematica front end begins to take shape…
[screenshots]
(Theo Gray invents cells and groups… and other things still seen today…)
"""
But also, even if it's true, it's kind of an offputting way to start the article. I know that's his thing and I know it's discussed every time one of these is posted here so apologies for the repetitive observation.
> According to Stephen Wolfram: "The idea of a notebook is to have an interactive document that freely mixes code, results, graphics, text and everything else.
By that description Smalltalk with its workspace goes back to the 70s. (I don't know if there's anything closer to the Mathematica notebooks from that era.)
My recollection (which could be wrong, it's been a while) is that SageMath’s notebook preceeded iPython notebooks. IIRC iPython started as a CLI repl, which may have come before the notebook.
(Mathematica came before all of them, and likely inspired SageMath’s interface)
> I wrote the Notebook user interface for Mathematica and led the user interface group for over 20 years.
Which, I suppose I can cede that they are among the first "web applications" that do this. But I have a hard time really getting behind a ton of the discussion on it. Even talking about the "breadth and depth" of part of the python community is to ignore how much had been done for years in the mathematica community.
I was soured as early advocates were pitching it as way more impressive than it is. With some being proud of themselves for realizing you can put a "pip install" at the top of the notebook, thinking that somehow made it repeatable. I recall senior engineers wanting notebooks to have prod access so that you could deploy from a notebook. And thinking they were making a good practice statement. Ugh.
So, yeah, seeing that Jupyter is being used more broadly than Mathematica, Wolfram should feel uncomfortable. (Also note that Jupyter is officially inspired by Mathematica.)
Is this a record that should be set straight?
I've used Jupyter since it was IPython notebook, but I don't think that community claims to be the first coming of notebooks. The accessibility of python along with the breadth and depth of the scipy community makes it a quite a tour de force. So perhaps these articles are aimed at people who only use open source tools.