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The power of the language came from the concise syntax (I liked it more then classical LISPs) with the huge library of Mathematica. When Python is "batteries in

• redfloatplane 10mo ago
  That's exactly the same analogy I used to use, although I said "nuclear reactor included" - spaceship is better, it implies less danger and more expanded horizons!
• themafia 10mo ago
  > As an expensive proprietary software however It's $195/year for a personal license. And only $75/year for students. Their licensing model is pretty broad.
  • zorked 10mo ago
    It still creates a class of haves and have-nots which prevents forming a community. Plus you buy a version of it, and then someone else is on another version, and you don't have the same features, and the tiny community is fragmented.
  • bborud 10mo ago
    Well, that doesn't sound too bad. But this is a high enough barrier for Mathematica to not see wide spread use. I don't remember what the pricing has been throughout the years. But I do remember that for some of the time I couldn't really afford Mathematica. And the license I wanted was also a bit too expensive to justify for a piece of software that only I would be using within an organization. Because it is also about enough other people around you not being able to justify the expense. And about companies not wanting to pay a lot of money for licenses so they can lock their computations into an ecosystem that is very small. Mathematica is, in the computing world, pretty irrelevant. And I'm being generous when I say "pretty": I have never encountered it in any job or even in academia. People know of it. They just don't use it for work. It would have been nice if the language and the runtime had been open source. But Wolfram didn't want to go in that direction. That's a perfectly fine choice to make. But it does mean that as a language, Mathematica will never be important. Nor will knowing how to program in it be a marketable skill. (To Stephen Wolfram it really doesn't matter. He obviously makes a good living. I'm not sure I'd bother with the noise and stress coming from open sourcing something)
    • aleph_minus_one 10mo ago
      > And I'm being generous when I say "pretty": I have never encountered it in any job or even in academia. People know of it. They just don't use it for work. To my knowledge, at least in academia, Wolfram (Mathematica) seems to be used quite a bit by physicists. Also in some areas of mathematics it is used (but many mathematicians seems to prefer Maple). Concerning mathematical research, I want to mention that by now also some open-source (and often more specialized) CASs seem to have become more widespread, such as SageMath, SymPy, Macaulay2, GP/PARI or GAP.
      • jjgreen 10mo ago
        In Maple sin(x) is "sin(x)", in Mathematica it's "Sin[x]", ewww
        • aleph_minus_one 10mo ago
          In my opinion, Wolfram/Mathematica is more consistent internally, while Maple is more consistent with the usual mathematical notation.
          • DonHopkins 10mo ago
            > while Maple is more consistent with the usual mathematical notation I can't tell if you're saying that as if it's a good thing, or a bad thing.
            • aleph_minus_one 10mo ago
              It's not about good nor bad, but about the different trade-offs that these two CASs made. What is more important for you is something that you can only answer for yourself.
        • pmkary 10mo ago
          I actually loved this idea so much that every language I make, I try to do the same. The point of it is that typing ( requires shift, while [ does not. And you have no idea when you have tunnel syndrome, how much it hurts each time you write a (. While it’s ugly, the hand thanks you for it.
  • jwrallie 10mo ago
    I’d like to use it sporadically, but they charge a lot for people in academia, and for my use case it’s simply not worth it. I’m using xcas now, it’s working pretty well for my humble needs.
  • jazzyjackson 10mo ago
    It's also free on raspberry pi
  • dataflow 10mo ago
    While I'm not sure the particular price point is the biggest problem here, the student license pricing doesn't feel seem that great either. The language is hard enough to learn, and most students won't have time to figure out if they want to buy it with a 15-day trial. They'd probably need half a semester at the very least, unless it's a required part of the curriculum. In the rare case where a student is already familiar enough to know they want it, then four years of $75/year is $300... at that point they may as well just pay $390 for a perpetual personal license, so they can at least keep opening their files in the future. That said, the parent was talking about it being expensive for use in industry. Personal and student licenses aren't relevant there.
  • the__alchemist 10mo ago
    Ok fuck it. Bought the year!
  • analog31 10mo ago
    My thought is that licenses were similarly cheap for historical programming tools like Turbo Pascal and Visual Basic. My dad got me Turbo Pascal for my birthday, for $39, after reading about it in the Wall Street Journal. But it seems like the proprietary languages have all withered, regardless of price. Even $195 for Mathematica is an obvious concession to this trend. I don't ever remember it being that cheap. I could write an essay on the benefits of free tooling, but enough has already been written. I'll spare you the slop. ;-)
  • wrxd 10mo ago
    Didn’t they also bundle something for free with Raspberry Pi OS?
• pjmlp 10mo ago
  As discussed on another thread, the outcome is poorly tools glued together, due to lack of roadmap and polish that commercial software usually supports, instead of volunteers coming and going, only caring for their little ich.
  • wasmainiac 10mo ago
    I’m not sure about that. I used to use LabView and its various libraries often. The whole thing felt scattered and ossified. I’d take a python standard library any day.
    • pjmlp 10mo ago
      Yet most EE engineers rather use a graphical tool like LabView or Simulink. Not everyone is keen doing scripting from command line with vi.
      • sallveburrpi 10mo ago
        Maybe it’s different for those actually working in the profession and n=1 but in my (many) years of studying EE I never used these tools even once.
      • amluto 10mo ago
        I once interned at a lab that used a piece of surely overpriced hardware that integrated with Simulink. You would make a Simulink model, and you’d click something and the computer would (IIRC) compile it to C and upload it to the hardware. On the bright side, you didn’t waste time bikeshedding about how to structure things. On the other hand, actually implementing any sort of nontrivial logic was incredibly unpleasant.
        • wasmainiac 10mo ago
          Hahaha yep, so much clicking after One day my finger was actually sore.
      • wasmainiac 10mo ago
• kingkongjaffa 10mo ago
  > If this was open sourced, it had the potential to severely change the software/IT industry. As an engineering undergrad I had a similar feeling about Matlab & Mathematica. Matlab especially had 'tool boxes' that you bought as add-ons to do specific engineering calcs and simulations and it was great, but I almost always found myself recreating things in python just because it felt slightly more sane to handle data and glue code. Pandas and Matplotlib and SciPy all used via an ipython notebook were almost a replacement.
• escanda 10mo ago
  Actually, Wolfram Language is based on Tiny Caml. M-expression based though. Lisps are neat and cosy too.
• YoshiRulz 10mo ago
  There is of course a FOSS rewrite https://mathics.org https://mathics.org