Ehhh, you know, he's not a journalist. He's the founder and CEO of a company that he is very hands on at. What you view as arrogance and self-promotion is really just a man who is obsessed with the technology he builds and works on every single day. No one is forcing you to read his stuff or pay attention to him.
In developing the ideas described in this book I have looked at many thousands of books, papers and websites—and have interacted with hundreds of people (see page xiii). But rather than trying to give a huge list of specific references, I have instead included in these notes historical information tracing key contributions. From the names of concepts and people that I mention, it is straightforward to do web or database searches that give a vastly more complete picture of available references than could possibly fit in a book of manageable size—or than could be created correctly without immense scholarship. Note that while most current works of science tend to refer mainly just to very recent material, this book often refers to material that is centuries or even millennia old—in some ways more in the tradition of fields like philosophy.
I can assure you staff do not write for him. In fact, he's known to get frustrated when people make suggestions on his writing because he's very particular (perhaps even stubborn) about it.
>>you can't build a deployable app with it with anything but a notebook interface. A notebook might be great for a researcher but it's not a good interface for many other kinds of programs.
So, he's just been sitting around for several years just waiting to "take action" ... doesn't really make sense. I'd also like to think that Jan Poeschko is smart enough to read a contract.
Watching his livestreams, he seems like a reasonable guy focused on real work designing a programming language and software. Not sure what you're alluding to in 1990, guess it's been disappeared from the web.
When I was consulting at Bell Labs in the early 1980s I saw that a friend of mine had two garbage cans in his office. When I asked him why, he explained that one was for genuine garbage and the other was a buffer into which he would throw documents that he thought he’d probably never want again. He’d let the buffer garbage can fill up, and once it was full, he’d throw away the lower documents in it, since from the fact that he hadn’t fished them out, he figured he’d probably never miss them if they were thrown away permanently.
The learning curve is pretty insane but once you get past that it's a really fun language to work in especially if you want to build or test something really fast just to see if something will work.