I saw this and thought it was the typical, flippant, light-grey comment that ends up in newbie downvote hell at the bottom of every HN story. Then I thought a bit more: it's better than that. The Ribbon and the predictive bar in Mathematica are actually quite similar in concept: both attempt to figure out what you're doing and present you with contextually relevant choices.
The difference is that I absolutely detest the ribbon in Office. I find it much easier to remember the path to a particular function in a menu or static toolbar, rather than be presented with an ever-changing soup of psuedo-relevant options; the ribbon denies me the chance to build muscle memory for activating common tasks. Conversely, the predictive bar in Mathematica works very well and I've been using it much more than I expected.
I think this is because Office is a massively limited system compared to Mathematica; it's easy to imagine it as a physical object with knobs and switches for every function, like a really complicated power tool. Mathematica is a gigantic programming language, so large that even its creator admits to having an incomplete understanding of its scope. An intelligent assistant that can show you some natural next steps in your calculation actually makes a lot of sense here.
Imagine if your IDE came with this sort of stuff! You've just added a UIToolbar to your UIView. Do you want to set up matching outlets in the associated view controller? You've just declared an AUGraph; click a button to put method calls in for setting it up and adding a few nodes.
The difference is that I absolutely detest the ribbon in Office. I find it much easier to remember the path to a particular function in a menu or static toolbar, rather than be presented with an ever-changing soup of psuedo-relevant options; the ribbon denies me the chance to build muscle memory for activating common tasks. Conversely, the predictive bar in Mathematica works very well and I've been using it much more than I expected.
I think this is because Office is a massively limited system compared to Mathematica; it's easy to imagine it as a physical object with knobs and switches for every function, like a really complicated power tool. Mathematica is a gigantic programming language, so large that even its creator admits to having an incomplete understanding of its scope. An intelligent assistant that can show you some natural next steps in your calculation actually makes a lot of sense here.
Imagine if your IDE came with this sort of stuff! You've just added a UIToolbar to your UIView. Do you want to set up matching outlets in the associated view controller? You've just declared an AUGraph; click a button to put method calls in for setting it up and adding a few nodes.