>> No new content. >You can't seriously mean that. I didn't say that. For the record, I use Mathematica too, and while I find it useful I'm more often that no

>> No new content. >You can't seriously mean that. I didn't say that. For the record, I use Mathematica too, and while I find it useful I'm more often that not left frustrated. Clearly they've improved these features, they just haven't improved them enough for my uses. I've personally used the Units package before and made audio spectrograms, without much issue but without much success either. I always had to turn to other tools to get the result I need, and this is still the case with Mathematica 9. The improvements aren't sufficient to make Mathematica useful for my particular uses. Let's take face detection as an example: http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/ref/FindFaces.html http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/ref/FindFaces.html Do we know how it finds the faces? What if we want it to find other facial features, or train it with another data set? With OpenCV, I can tell it to use a custom Haar cascade. The only options Mathematica exposes are face size! Having a feature in a bullet point isn't sufficient if the feature isn't fleshed-out enough to be useful. More generally, I find myself using Matlab more often even though it doesn't work quite as well for my purposes. And why? Because it has easily readable source files, more in-depth documentation that tells you how its algorithms work, it has an open-source alternative that's more or less source-compatible (Octave; Matlab gives me a nice GUI and a pleasant working environment, but a colleague can run my files) and also uses open source software in a lot of cases so its output can be independently verified. It's that kind of thing that Mathematica needs to work on, not surface level features that probably aren't going to be useful for people who actually need them. If someone's project relies on good face detection I doubt very much they'd find FindFaces[] sufficient. Which is not to say Mathematica isn't better for having it than not having it at all, and I am sympathetic that they have to start somewhere... Edit: I just want to add thatI have no doubt a lot of very smart people are working at Wolfram, and a lot of these features are great. I just can't help but think that developer effort is somewhat misplaced. The graph in the blog post of number of functions against time only goes to highlight that. When you see the number of people clamouring for undo support, or a better GUI, or existing features being better-explained or more fleshed out, I think that's what they should be concentrating on rather than adding new features to the list. Though the new Tensor functions are pretty cool..