> Wow, just mentioning himself in an essay about his search to learn historical figures are is pretty normal for this type of essay. He is trying to relate to the figures he is writing about. I've read people talking about Nelson going on about the feel of a deck and the differences from modern sailing. This is no more than that.

No, this is quite different. Wolfram clearly and unequivocally depicts his accomplishments as being significant to the same degree as Babbage and Lovelace, if not even more significant. The significance of Wolfram's accomplishments is not relevant to an article about Babbage and Lovelace. Even just a neutral statement of Wolfram's accomplishments is not very relevant (especially because of all of the controversy around the actual proof of the main result that Wolfram tries to take credit for, but that's just an aside).

> That is actually pretty normal for anyone running a blog on their corporate site. It doesn't compromise a neutral account just wiki-ing up the article.

Yes, it does compromise neutral accounts. That's why we don't consider anecdotes published on marketing blogs to be reliable neutral accounts. Even so, I agree that Wolfram did a lot of work here, and that large sections of this essay are of far higher quality than a typical marketing blog. Which makes it all the more tragic that he ruined the overall piece by needing to shoehorn in unrelated comments about his own career and proprietary projects.

> No, it just shows how much the world of computation has improved and how amazing the accomplishments of both Ada and Babbage. I would have said FORTRAN, but that's more my thing as some probably would have said R.

No. There are any number of ways to higlight how the landscape of computing has changed (although, higlighting that in an essay about Lovelace's contributions in her time is already on thin ice as far as relevancy goes) -- almost all of which don't involve plugging the specific proprietary project that the author worked on. It's disingenuous of you to nonchalantly act like it could have been FORTRAN or R or whatever, as if Mathematica is "just another" option and "just so happened" to be the one that Wolfram chose to highlight. Yeah, right.

> No, I gave a count and actually assembled a list.

This could still be consistent with choosing two innocuous quotes to draw attention away from the many flagrant quotes in the article. There's no way to know based solely on your supply of just those two particular quotes in your original reply.

> Hey, if I had went to the same school as Babbage, I sure would of pointed it out. Heck, I would have shown pictures.

Again, the school comment is not the sort of comment I am criticizing. There's no need for you to defend it again after I already agreed it was innocuous. If all of Wolfram's self-promotional asides were like that, it would be a little tiresome but no big deal. They are not like that.

> No, it just gives the experience of one man seeing historical figures and relating them in terms he uses daily. Your reading is uncharitable.

No, it's once again extremely disingenuous to act like repeated self-promotional asides are merely "terms he uses daily." Unfortunately, that may actually be true about Wolfram, but it doesn't change the fact that it's the terms' self-promotional-ness that is the problem, and whether they are common idioms for Wolfram (e.g. whether he self-promotes a lot and that is just how he internalizes the things he learns about) is irrelevant to other readers.

So, we disagree and that's OK. You're certainly welcome to find my interpretation uncharitable. I continue to believe that it is Wolfram himself being uncharitable, and supplying a wealth of evidence to support this with his own writing.

It really does take what would otherwise be a nice essay and ruin it. Some of it can be overlooked, but I find that in particular the mentions of the Principle of Computational Equivalence and the references to his own supposedly long-suffering career battles that have required "grit" and "leadership" specifically on Wolfram's part are way over the top and just not at all defensible along the lines of what you are saying.