Textbooks are enough of a boondogle. Forcing entire generations of students to learn things like Matlab and Mathematica only sustains their ridiculous price tag

Textbooks are enough of a boondogle. Forcing entire generations of students to learn things like Matlab and Mathematica only sustains their ridiculous price tags. The student versions being so cheap does not make the situation better, it makes it worse. It's borderline rent seeking. There are plenty of free (capital and lower case 'f') alternatives, like Python, Fortran, etc. They may not be as 'powerful' of tools but they are adequate for teaching the basics of how to translate formal mathematical reasoning into concrete code. The only things that Mathematica, Maple and Matlab add are pre-packaged library functions that do all the hard work for you. This is what makes them powerful tools and if the student, after he or she graduates, decides that power is worth the price that's fine, but getting them hooked on it while in school is detrimental to their learning for all the reasons being discussed in this thread.