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)

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aleph_minus_one 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> 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.

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jjgreen 4 hours ago | parent [-]

In Maple sin(x) is "sin(x)", in Mathematica it's "Sin[x]", ewww

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pmkary 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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SSLy 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> The point of it is that typing ( requires shift, while [ does not.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xkeyboard-config/xkeyboard-co...

Now, I really could've used something like this on macOS…

Karabiner to the rescue https://genesy.github.io/karabiner-complex-rules-generator/#...

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esafak 44 minutes ago | parent [-]

As everybody knows ...

	▲	SSLy 18 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I use(d) arch btw

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aleph_minus_one 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

In my opinion, Wolfram/Mathematica is more consistent internally, while Maple is more consistent with the usual mathematical notation.

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DonHopkins 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> 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 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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andrewaylett 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I definitely get the impression that Wolfram builds his tools primarily for himself, and is happy to let other people play with them because that way he gets money to pay for them.

	▲	pmkary 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That is not the impression, that is exactly why, And actually that is their strength. Back in the days the whole Apple was there to make software for Jobs and look how awesome that turned out. Wolfram is trying to complete tue work of Leibniz and create a universal calculus. A unifying language for symbolic computation, which is amazing.