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.

To be fair, "sundry tools poorly glued together" describes CAS and symbolic computation software in general, including Maple or Mathematica. It's surprisingly difficult to put a proper formal foundation (guaranteeing the absence of "wrong" or even outright meaningless results) even on very basic symbolic manipulations.

Commercial software polish is lipstick on a pig. A pig that will never be anything else and will eventually die as a pig.

Ugly os software at least has potential to grow internally. Long lived commercial software is a totting carcass with fresh coat of paint every now and then.

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.

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)

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.

It's also free on raspberry pi

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.

Yeah, I was one of those schmucks that used sympy / python instead of mathematica in my physics coursework. Policy was "mathematica is recommended and supported, but you can bring your own tools if you want to and can make them work."

In retrospect, doing the work in mathematica would have probably stretched my brain more (in a good way!) since it provides a different and powerful way of solving problems vs other languages...maybe I'll have to revisit it. Perhaps even try advent of code with it?

While python did get the job done, it feels like the ceiling (especially for power users) is so much higher in mathematica.

Mathematica is awesome for weird, one-off tasks in fields that I'm unfamiliar with, since the documentation is excellent, and the functionality is really broad (so I don't need to figure out how to install a specialty program for every one-off task). But for fields that I'm experienced with or tasks that I'm planning on running frequently, I'll usually just use Python, since most of the Python libraries have more functionality and run quicker than Mathematica.

(Mathematica is of course much better than Python at symbolic math, but this isn't what you are asking about)