5 ms·

I wish Mathematica was more affordable. I loved using it as a student, but now I can no longer afford it. A professional license costs 3500€. Which is probably

I wish Mathematica was more affordable. I loved using it as a student, but now I can no longer afford it. A professional license costs 3500€. Which is probably worth it if you use it every day, but not so much if you just use it just once a month to make a graph or integrate something. They have a "hobby" license for 350€, which is reasonable, but according to their license it can't be used for anything work related. I think this is an issue with a lot of professional software. It's priced for heavy users and if you are just an occasional user, you are out of luck.

JorgeGT 8y ago
There's always Mathematica for the Raspberry Pi, completely free for personal use! https://www.wolfram.com/raspberry-pi/ https://www.wolfram.com/raspberry-pi/
- jakobegger 8y ago
  I would want to use Mathematica for work related stuff, though.
  - gregschlom 8y ago
    Well then maybe your company can afford it, no? (Unless you're a bootstrapping startup, of course)
    - AlotOfReading 8y ago
      I suspect many people are in the same position I am. I like the tool and occasionally wish I had a copy at work, but the problems I would use it on are infrequent and/or peripheral to my actual job. It's hard to justify burning the social capital for an 'occasional' nicety.
    - jakobegger 8y ago
      My company isn't going to pay 3500€ for a tool that I don't really need.
- marco_salvatori 8y ago
  Since a full version Mathematica is available on the Raspberry Pi, anyone who is interested has a very inexpensive route to getting a free copy. Mathematica is very functional on the Raspberry Pi and, I think, making the software available as such is very generous of Wolfram. Also for those who cant afford a Raspberry Pi, excellent mathematical functionality is available via the Wolfram Alpha website for free.
  - mycall 8y ago
    > those who cant afford a Raspberry Pi That is very few people who would use Mathematica, no?
  - bscphil 8y ago
    >excellent mathematical functionality is available via the Wolfram Alpha website for free. My experience is that they've significantly ratcheted down the amount of compute time per request in recent years. It's become much less useful to me because so many of my requests time out.
marmaduke 8y ago
I had a similar gripe: I’ve tried several times the trial versions but 14 days is way too short to get up the learning curve far enough to see whether it’s useable or not. And even then, if I only need it a few hours a week, I couldn’t justify the costs.
chobytes 8y ago
Yeah, I'm a student right now and I've come to really like mathematica... I'll probably even get the hobby license after school, but I don't think I could justify the cost of using it professionally.
- brianpgordon 8y ago
  My school is for some reason still renewing my student license 7 years after graduating, so if they're that lax everywhere you might not have to worry. :P
- crodri54 8y ago
  Since you're a student and enjoy using Mathematica, I would recommend taking a look at this http://www.wolfram.com/company/careers/ambassador/ http://www.wolfram.com/company/careers/ambassador/. It's an opportunity for student enthusiasts to share their use and interest on campus, in return Wolfram provides access to tech and other stuff noted.
marmaduke 8y ago
btw it seems the develop open cloud thing is mostly free, which might do it for some cases, https://develop.wolframcloud.com https://develop.wolframcloud.com
phonon 8y ago
Maybe http://www.wolfram.com/development-platform/pricing/ http://www.wolfram.com/development-platform/pricing/ ? There is even a free plan. Not sure how different it is from "regular" Mathematica, or what licensing restrictions there are.
cr0sh 8y ago
Have you looked at Octave? https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/ https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/
- askvictor 8y ago
  Octave is more a replacement for MATLAB than Mathematica.
  - EpicEng 8y ago
    True, but the GP said that all he does is create some plots and Integra e every so often. Octave can handle that.
- 4thaccount 8y ago
  Octave and Scilab are more Matlab like replacements as a user below commented. Sure both are for mathematical code, but Octave is more for numerical work and Mathematica for Symbolic computation. However, Mathematica is powerful in a much bigger way than Octave. Mathematica is more like a very successful and commercial lisp in that it has zillions of composable and we'll documented functions for everything. You don't just copy in a link to an image you want to do something with, but can literally copy paste an image into a function and immediately do stuff with it in a way I've never seen before. Recently I wanted to draw up pretty advanced network diagrams using the images our vendor used. I simply copy pasted them in and then used the graph theory primitives to draw a diagram. Then I noticed that I wanted to add a different picture and it didn't match the color scheme of the vendor. No problem...I just passed it to yet another Mathematica primitive to invert the colors. This was all REPL like interactive and easy to do. There are lots of little commands like this. My favorite example is a file open command that works on over 100 file types. The obvious ones like CSV, XML, JSON, .XLS, & TXT are all there, but so are other file formats like .MPS optimization files, common biology file formats, weather forecasting file types. Chaining this together is insanely easy. Suppose you want to solve a linear programming problem and you have a .MPS file. Just open the file and wrap it in the LinearProgram[] command and then wrap in a FileOutput[] command if I want to write to a text file. There's a lot more for Python where I have to import libraries and write loops. Mathematica ain't perfect though. It has a large runtime and doing more complicated work doesn't scale as well as I would like for writing big programs. Code distribution is also harder. Nobody else on my team is going to want to install the Mathematica runtime to run my code. Overall it is pretty nice though and I think it would surprise most HN users.
laythea 8y ago
This is how compilers and IDE's were, back in the day. Things changed and now community editions are rife. Maybe this will happen someday with Maths software.
jayalpha 8y ago
Please have a look at sagemath. https://www.sagemath.org/ https://www.sagemath.org/

JorgeGT 8y ago

There's always Mathematica for the Raspberry Pi, completely free for personal use! https://www.wolfram.com/raspberry-pi/ https://www.wolfram.com/raspberry-pi/

jakobegger 8y ago
I would want to use Mathematica for work related stuff, though.
- gregschlom 8y ago
  Well then maybe your company can afford it, no? (Unless you're a bootstrapping startup, of course)
  - AlotOfReading 8y ago
    I suspect many people are in the same position I am. I like the tool and occasionally wish I had a copy at work, but the problems I would use it on are infrequent and/or peripheral to my actual job. It's hard to justify burning the social capital for an 'occasional' nicety.
  - jakobegger 8y ago
    My company isn't going to pay 3500€ for a tool that I don't really need.
marco_salvatori 8y ago
Since a full version Mathematica is available on the Raspberry Pi, anyone who is interested has a very inexpensive route to getting a free copy. Mathematica is very functional on the Raspberry Pi and, I think, making the software available as such is very generous of Wolfram. Also for those who cant afford a Raspberry Pi, excellent mathematical functionality is available via the Wolfram Alpha website for free.
- mycall 8y ago
  > those who cant afford a Raspberry Pi That is very few people who would use Mathematica, no?
- bscphil 8y ago
  >excellent mathematical functionality is available via the Wolfram Alpha website for free. My experience is that they've significantly ratcheted down the amount of compute time per request in recent years. It's become much less useful to me because so many of my requests time out.

marmaduke 8y ago

I had a similar gripe: I’ve tried several times the trial versions but 14 days is way too short to get up the learning curve far enough to see whether it’s useable or not. And even then, if I only need it a few hours a week, I couldn’t justify the costs.

chobytes 8y ago

Yeah, I'm a student right now and I've come to really like mathematica... I'll probably even get the hobby license after school, but I don't think I could justify the cost of using it professionally.

brianpgordon 8y ago
My school is for some reason still renewing my student license 7 years after graduating, so if they're that lax everywhere you might not have to worry. :P
crodri54 8y ago
Since you're a student and enjoy using Mathematica, I would recommend taking a look at this http://www.wolfram.com/company/careers/ambassador/ http://www.wolfram.com/company/careers/ambassador/. It's an opportunity for student enthusiasts to share their use and interest on campus, in return Wolfram provides access to tech and other stuff noted.

marmaduke 8y ago

btw it seems the develop open cloud thing is mostly free, which might do it for some cases, https://develop.wolframcloud.com https://develop.wolframcloud.com

phonon 8y ago

Maybe http://www.wolfram.com/development-platform/pricing/ http://www.wolfram.com/development-platform/pricing/ ? There is even a free plan. Not sure how different it is from "regular" Mathematica, or what licensing restrictions there are.

cr0sh 8y ago

Have you looked at Octave? https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/ https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/

askvictor 8y ago
Octave is more a replacement for MATLAB than Mathematica.
- EpicEng 8y ago
  True, but the GP said that all he does is create some plots and Integra e every so often. Octave can handle that.
4thaccount 8y ago
Octave and Scilab are more Matlab like replacements as a user below commented. Sure both are for mathematical code, but Octave is more for numerical work and Mathematica for Symbolic computation. However, Mathematica is powerful in a much bigger way than Octave. Mathematica is more like a very successful and commercial lisp in that it has zillions of composable and we'll documented functions for everything. You don't just copy in a link to an image you want to do something with, but can literally copy paste an image into a function and immediately do stuff with it in a way I've never seen before. Recently I wanted to draw up pretty advanced network diagrams using the images our vendor used. I simply copy pasted them in and then used the graph theory primitives to draw a diagram. Then I noticed that I wanted to add a different picture and it didn't match the color scheme of the vendor. No problem...I just passed it to yet another Mathematica primitive to invert the colors. This was all REPL like interactive and easy to do. There are lots of little commands like this. My favorite example is a file open command that works on over 100 file types. The obvious ones like CSV, XML, JSON, .XLS, & TXT are all there, but so are other file formats like .MPS optimization files, common biology file formats, weather forecasting file types. Chaining this together is insanely easy. Suppose you want to solve a linear programming problem and you have a .MPS file. Just open the file and wrap it in the LinearProgram[] command and then wrap in a FileOutput[] command if I want to write to a text file. There's a lot more for Python where I have to import libraries and write loops. Mathematica ain't perfect though. It has a large runtime and doing more complicated work doesn't scale as well as I would like for writing big programs. Code distribution is also harder. Nobody else on my team is going to want to install the Mathematica runtime to run my code. Overall it is pretty nice though and I think it would surprise most HN users.

laythea 8y ago

This is how compilers and IDE's were, back in the day. Things changed and now community editions are rife. Maybe this will happen someday with Maths software.

jayalpha 8y ago

Please have a look at sagemath. https://www.sagemath.org/ https://www.sagemath.org/