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> What do people use Mathematica for that can't be done in R, SAS, Matlab, SPSS or Python libraries. Nothing; but Mathematica has been the tool of choice for c
by jlg23 10y ago
> What do people use Mathematica for that can't be done in R, SAS, Matlab, SPSS or Python libraries.
Nothing; but Mathematica has been the tool of choice for cs education (or math+cs) and people tend to stick to what they know.
- PeCaN 10y agoI think you're thinking of Matlab. Mathematica isn't particularly huge in education (yet).
- danieller 10y agoMatlab might be more popular in engineering, but Mathematica is pretty pervasive world wide in math and physics especially
- iamcreasy 10y agoCan you elaborate on why Matlab is more popular in Engineering and Mathematics in math and physics?
- danieller 10y agoNot sure, could have to do with early marketing in the 80s - we all know academia likes to stay on a path regardless of new developments. Could be as simple as "Mathematica" has math in its name and was developed by a physicist...and "Matlab" has lab in its name. Fickle folks, idk.
- protomikron 10y agoAnd this is actually a terrible thing. Fortunately my school did this stuff with the Python stack, however the situation is similar to MS Office - it is taught in schools (general education I mean) and so people struggle with e.g. LibreOffice. However I have to agree that the UI of Mathematica is superb. Jupyter Notebook is a nice free alternative, but its recent development (Jupyter Lab) seemed very "ideish" and got me scared (do not get me wrong, it looks pretty slick and must have been complicated to engineer - but for me the nice thing about the notebook was that it is _not_ an IDE like Netbeans, Eclipse, QT-Creator - i.e. the classic ide UI that is separated into editor, file-viewer, shell and something like variable inspector). But this is a different story.