| It really is well-designed and pleasant to use for the sort of programming that scientists and (real) engineers do. Not just symbolic math, but any kind of technical computing, done at least partly interactively, on a single powerful machine. Stephen Wolfram actually is very good at designing a programming language and standard library (and he does personally oversee most of it). A lot of work has gone into picking the right set of functions to provide at the right level of abstraction. Tools are provided to avoid a lot of bullshit; like there are just functions "Import" and "Export" which mostly work automatically and can read and write to all kinds of bizarre file formats. You don't need to go dig for an unmaintained library on pypi. It's also probably the most visually pretty programming environment you can use, which ended up being more important to me than I would have expected. The licensing cost doesn't seem like such a big downside to me, because it is probably worth $115/month for someone who would use it. Obviously much cheaper for academia. The closed-source aspect is a bigger problem; if it doesn't do quite what you want, you really are out of luck, and there's no way to crack it open and make a small change or see what's happening. On the other hand, most of the target market (engineers and scientists who only write code to produce something else they want) would never do that anyway. Support for machine learning used to be nonexistent but is now pretty good although a little more opaque to the end user than it ought to be. Somewhat separate from that, they have a set of Keras-esque neural network facilities which is extremely good in terms of design and usability. As for the gee-whiz features, mostly they aren't that useful, unsurprisingly. The feature to translate inline natural language input to expressions of code (done with Ctrl-=) is surprisingly nice for small things, however, because it can handle dates and times really easily. |