Science Quote by Stephen Wolfram

That breezy dash before “I really doubt” is doing a lot of political work. Wolfram is speaking in the soothing dialect of software change-management: a promise that disruption exists, but only in a quarantined corner where ordinary users supposedly don’t live. It’s the kind of sentence meant to keep momentum on the side of shipping, not stalling. “A few,” “very small,” “incompatible” - each term is a minimizer, a stack of cushions around the one word that actually matters: incompatible.

The intent is pragmatic: reassure the broad base while implicitly telling power users to read the release notes and deal with it. The subtext is a familiar bargain in technical culture: progress demands casualties, but we’ll define “most people” in a way that keeps the headline clean. It also quietly reframes responsibility. If you “run into them,” you’re no longer part of “most people”; you’re an edge case. Your pain becomes evidence of your exceptionalism, not of a decision that could have been avoided.

Context matters because Wolfram, as both a scientist and a product-builder, sits at the junction where rigorous systems meet real human expectations. Incompatibilities are rarely “small” to the person whose workflow breaks at 2 a.m. The line acknowledges that reality just enough to sound honest, then contains it. It’s a soft-spoken assertion of authority: trust the architect, accept the update, and if something snaps, assume you wandered off the paved road.