Yeah, NKS clearly came after Mathematica, but I think there's a strong through-line there that goes back to his early work and connects directly to this meta-math stuff he's doing now.
The core language is a pattern matching substitution system, and that's what he eventually distills into his 1d automata and then generalizes to meta-math.
"at the core of Mathematica is the notion of storing collections of rules in which each rule specifies how to transform all pieces of data that are similar enough to match a single Mathematica pattern. And the success of Mathematica provides considerable evidence for the power of this kind of approach."
https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/p627--human-thinking/
It's been a while since I read NKS but I recall him saying he started playing with automata earlier and getting some of the ideas for NKS then, but then did Wolfram Research/Mathematica for some time while he was noodling. I think that's kinda supported by his timeline:
Indeed there is not much for Mathematica physics on GitHub:
7,833 repos using Mathematica [1]
363 repos of that containing "physics" [2]
I expect that's a pretty heavy undercount as they've not pursued open-source. That's disappointing to me and I agree they missed out on a lot; I think those two are strongly connected. But also he kept his business afloat and did crazy (good) science on the side.
I think you'll get a more accurate view of things reading contemporary sources than his post-hoc justifications of why Mathematica was really NKS all along. If anything, Mathematica also missed the boat on proof assistants, which it should have totally nailed - so if anything, any NKS ideology embodied in Mathematica held it back here as the field verged to being grounded in type theory. (But more likely - ordinary large codebase too difficult to adapt.)
I don't think GitHub will be able to tell you much about how physicists are working one way or another. Physicists in general, and also mathematicians and researching engineers who I suspect make up the bulk of most Mathematica users, don't use GitHub.
Yeah, NKS clearly came after Mathematica, but I think there's a strong through-line there that goes back to his early work and connects directly to this meta-math stuff he's doing now.
The core language is a pattern matching substitution system, and that's what he eventually distills into his 1d automata and then generalizes to meta-math.
"at the core of Mathematica is the notion of storing collections of rules in which each rule specifies how to transform all pieces of data that are similar enough to match a single Mathematica pattern. And the success of Mathematica provides considerable evidence for the power of this kind of approach." https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/p627--human-thinking/
It's been a while since I read NKS but I recall him saying he started playing with automata earlier and getting some of the ideas for NKS then, but then did Wolfram Research/Mathematica for some time while he was noodling. I think that's kinda supported by his timeline:
Indeed there is not much for Mathematica physics on GitHub: I expect that's a pretty heavy undercount as they've not pursued open-source. That's disappointing to me and I agree they missed out on a lot; I think those two are strongly connected. But also he kept his business afloat and did crazy (good) science on the side.Did find this though. Looks neat!
https://github.com/FeynCalc/feyncalc maintained by: https://github.com/vsht
[1] https://github.com/search?q=language%3AMathematica&type=Repo... [2] https://github.com/search?q=language%3AMathematica+physics&t...