[jrockway]

Mathematica has been on my mind since high school because we got it for free. I went through the free trial process recently and tried a couple of things I have been too lazy to manually code up (some video analysis). It was too slow to be useful. My notebooks that were analyzing videos just locked up while processing was going on, and Mathematica bogged down too much to even save the notebook with its "I'm crashing, try and save stuff" mode. I ultimately found it a waste of time for general purpose programming; the library functions as documented were much better than library functions I could get for a free language, but they just wouldn't run and keep the "respond to the UI" thread alive.

So basically all their advertising money ended up being wasted because they can't fork off ffmpeg or whatever. Still very good at symbolic calculus and things like that, though.