Surely Wofram deserves the Nobel as much as Hopfield and Hinton? Not for this stuff of course (which I doubt many take seriously), but because he also provided us with an amazing computational tool without which physics would be very far behind where it is today?
[And at least I knew his name already unlike our current laureates whom I just had to look up!]
This year is an exception because of the AI Gen AI Artificial Intelligence AI AI zeitgeist.
If we keep giving the physics Nobel to people building computer tools, soon it will have to be renowned physicist Linus Torvalds, whose computational platform underlies every big physics experiment.
I'm not sure physicists would be thrilled if we keep going in that direction.
I think this is one of the rare times I feel comfortable speculating that had he not created Mathematica than someone else would have.
There was a demand and plenty of people with interest.
He was just in the right place with the right set of skills to execute on it before others and won the market in its infancy. Also it's a small enough market that the like of Mircosoft didn't feel the need to come in and crush him like they did Lotus 1-2-3.
I suspect you are right - but multiple Nobel prizes have gone to people who got there only very slightly ahead of others in the race. Would be tough to argue that there are many prizes which are for work that wouldn't have been done within a decade of when the winner actually did do it.
[And at least I knew his name already unlike our current laureates whom I just had to look up!]