[bborud]

A more important question: what happened to Wolfram? I think they missed an opportunity to have an enormous market by pricing themselves into a niche. They had so much cool stuff that could have played a much larger role in most developers lives. And which would have funneled more users into higher end premium products.

Every now and then I go to their site to have a look -- and then realize that I'm not going to go subscribe to some piece of software I'm unsure I will be using enough to justify the cost.

[gfodor]

Wolfram himself is working on physics and fulfilling a life long dream. (He was just on Lex’s podcast.) Say what you will about his contributions but it is hard to argue he hasn’t been enormously successful at achieving his goals of developing an entire cathedral of work he can use for his own intellectual persuits.

[jazzyjackson]

they have plenty of customers and are always hiring so I don’t think there’s much pressure to change their business model… they have a 15 day trial and IMO the ~$200/yr I pay for a dual boot personal license is worth it for the documentation alone, AMA

I think their online book is a very nice intro: https://www.wolfram.com/language/elementary-introduction/2nd...

[bborud]

So the price is right on the limit for something I'd like to play around a bit with at home and "maybe it sticks". This is something I'd like to learn for the programming environment. But I'm not going to write software based on this that actually does something. I don't want to produce software that has a $200/year dependency. So then the amount of time I can invest goes down sharply.

I mean, good for them that they're doing well. They probably don't need the money. But their technology is highly unlikely to ever be part of any software I write. And it isn't because it is a bad fit. I do lots of stuff that would benefit greatly from having Mathematica plugged into it.

Thanks for the tip on the book. I might actually buy the paper edition and read that.