> acting like you have some God-given right to inspect its inner workings. As it happens, closed-source mathematical software is next to useless for anything s

> acting like you have some God-given right to inspect its inner workings. As it happens, closed-source mathematical software is next to useless for anything serious, and for scientific work, it's fatal. This is the single biggest obstacle to programs like Mathematica -- it may be useful for experimentation, but once one intends to publish, it has to be completely excluded from the process. Imagine someone claiming to have cured cancer, but using a method that other laboratories cannot imitate or inspect, essentially black magic. That's what faces people who try to use Mathematica in scientific work. It violates the most basic principle of science -- transparency.