A former colleague went to the APS spring meeting in Boston in 2011 (I think) and went to visit the Mathematica booth there. To his surprise, he found Stephen W

A former colleague went to the APS spring meeting in Boston in 2011 (I think) and went to visit the Mathematica booth there. To his surprise, he found Stephen Wolfram himself standing there and showing off some cool Mathematica features to a small crowd of physicists. My colleague was (and probably is) a total Mathematica fanboy and evangelist and seeing Wolfram himself talk to users there made a big impression to him. I also have to say kudos to that, not many CEOs of billion dollar companies take the time to mingle with their users let alone show them how to get the most out of their software. That said Mathematica is a brilliant piece of software and I have never seen a more powerful system for computer algebra and symbolic computation. It is kind of slow but what you can do with it is absolutely amazing, so I think it will remain relevant for the foreseeable future.