[bborud]

The first time I encountered Mathematica was 30 years ago, and I genuinely thought that within a decade this would be a tool that everyone would learn in college. A few years later, when working at the university I was a bit puzzled to find that while you could find things like Matlab on the various computer labs around campus (usually running some flavor of Unix), Mathematica was nowhere to be seen. Not even on the Windows labs.

The guy who was in charge of negotiating software licenses for the university said that it was a chicken and egg problem. Mathematica wasn't very available because it was expensive, Wolfram wasn't easy to negotiate with.

With people not learning Mathematica there never developed a demand for it - and because you couldn't expect to get your hands on a license it wasn't worth the investment both in time and money to learn mathematica, or worse yet, to make yourself dependent on it for getting work done.

Mathematica has always been a lovely product. But it has also always been impractical due to its pricing and restrictions. Whether you are in academia, a working professional or just a hobbyist. Which has made it a very niche piece of software. For 30+ years.

There is no reason to believe this will change. And that's fine. It is their software and they can do whatever they want with it. But it also means it is largely irrelevant software for most people, including the scientific community. That isn't a disparaging remark, it is an accurate representation of reality.

[kgwgk]

> Mathematica has always been a lovely product. But it has also always been impractical due to its pricing and restrictions. Whether you are in academia, a working professional or just a hobbyist. [...] There is no reason to believe this will change.

The hobbyist license is less than $200 per year. What kind of pricing would make it practical for you?

[Edit: The student license (non-expiring) was $139 twenty years ago, $176 today. That may be "expensive" but many textbooks cost more than that.]

[jiggawatts]

Once in a blue moon I use Mathematica as an overpowered calculator. I keep it around partly for nostalgia, and partly because it makes me feel like a true computer scientist.

Every time I use it, I have this mental image of using a 500 ton press to crack a walnut. It's ludicrous overkill, but it brings a certain satisfaction to be able to use arbitrary precision maths when I don't need to, and use nonlinear fits for graphs where nobody looking at the result will even begin to appreciate the difference it makes.

This is the problem -- there is a "long tail" of people like me that have used Mathematica at university that are loathe to let go, but can't really justify the ongoing price.

This is why there are free editions of many paid tools. IntelliJ IDEA and Visual Studio have free "community editions", for example. More importantly, the build tools are generally free.

Even eye-wateringly expensive enterprise products with "call us" pricing have free editions! For example, VMware ESXi, Oracle, DB2, and SQL Server all do.

Wolfram is one of the last all-proprietary, no-free option, no open-source holdouts, especially in the space of "general purpose languages".

[easrng]

It's free for personal use on Raspberry Pis btw, and also there's some kind of free tier for Wolfram Cloud.

[LionTamer]

Do you have a link for the free Raspberry api use?

[NavinF]

Just run “sudo apt install wolfram-engine” on Raspbian.

[danuker]

> no-free option

Perhaps Wolfram Alpha is a "free option" for the once-in-a-blue-moon use case.

But you might lose any work at any moment, if Wolfram decides to turn it off.

[NavinF]

It has to be low enough for mass adoption. I’d guess $2/mo or $10/yr.

I paid for the $200 license back in high school 10 years ago and it was absolutely amazing; Really ahead of its time and well worth the money. But today as a software engineer the only feature I’m missing in Python is the ability to run natural language expressions in the middle of my code. Besides that, Python is far superior thanks to the community investment and the ability to easily deploy my code.

[ziotom78]

I agree. I am still using Mathematica 5 for Students, which I purchased when I was a student. Despite the fact that at the time I bought the version for Windows, it is worki g like a charm on my Linux laptop thanks to Wine.

Nowadays my daily workflow is mainly based on Python and Julia, I use Mathematica just for symbolic calculations (solving differentialequations, computing integrals...)

P.S. Once I had the chance to use Mathematica 12 on a server in my University, but I found that it offered nothing that I could need that wasn't already in version 5...

[kgwgk]

For the record, the question was not about getting "mass adoption" but about the price that would make such a lovely product worth it for a hobbyist. Most hobbys are much more expensive than $10 per year!

[NavinF]

Sure, I’d gladly pay $200 again if it had a large community and a deployment story. What I meant is that I wouldn’t use it again unless it achieved mass adoption. That in turn requires dirt cheap pricing even if I don’t directly care about the price.

[bastawhiz]

That's kind of the problem: $188/y is almost twice as much as it costs to distribute an iOS app. It's two times the cost of a hobby dyno from Heroku for a year.

What can you do with a hobby license from Wolfram? Use the software. You can't really distribute it, put it in production, or anything else besides serve your own compute needs. They forbid you from using the Home versions for any non-personal use: you can't bootstrap your startup with it. You're not allowed to get reimbursed for it by your employer. You're not allowed to use it for academic purposes. The service plan lets you use your license on a second computer, but dual boot counts as a second computer. You can't upgrade your license, you can only buy a new one. It's almost as though they don't want you to use their software.

Why would anyone who doesn't already have experience with Mathematica pay for this license?

[kgwgk]

Who does pay for this license? Someone who wants to use Mathematica, I guess.

You can get a 15-day trial, by the way.

Why would anyone pay $100+ for a couple of games? Or for Photoshop? Or for a pair ski goggles? Or for a bottle of wine? Or for a ticket to a show? Or for a radial saw?

[bastawhiz]

The things you listed either are what that type of thing costs, or have free alternatives that you can develop interest and skill with. Adobe doesn't tell you what you can do with the pictures you make or edit.

The difference with Mathematica is that if you don't know you like and need it already, there are numerous free and less expensive tools that do a great job, and they (usually) don't have restrictions on what you can do with them. I can make a Python notebook and start a business with it. I can use my hobby Julia code for academic research.

[kgwgk]

Depending on what you are trying to do saying that Python or Julia are great alternatives to Mathematica is like saying that Java is a great alternative to Python and Julia.

Some people find enough value in Mathematica, Matlab, Tableau, JMP or commercial IDEs, compilers, libraries, etc. to prefer them to the free unrestricted alternatives available.

Some people like iPhones and Macs, some people say that there are numerous less expensive devices that do a great job and don't have restrictions on what you can do with them.

[bborud]

In terms of price: a price point that means a significant portion of my peers will also pay for Mathematica without too much hesitation. The value proposition changes radically when a tool is something "everyone" runs or which everyone can afford to run.

But pricing isn't the only problem here. The licensing model would have to be far more permissive. Plus I think any language that hopes to be successful would at least require an open source compiler, runtime and standard library.

[Archit3ch]

> a price point that means a significant portion of my peers will also pay for Mathematica without too much hesitation

A perpetual license for Office Professional 2021 costs low double digits (depends on locale). They also don't really enforce checks for non-commercial use. As a result, almost every office uses Excel. It still doesn't replace python/C++ for deployment.

[bborud]

> As a result, almost every office uses Excel.

I'll have to disagree with your conclusion.

Excel has been the de facto standard for spreadsheets for a couple of decades so its user base is not because of how the office suite is priced right now, but because it is "what everyone uses".

This effect is even so powerful that despite Apple's suite (whatever it is called this year) being free, and various free online offerings exist that are adequate for a large chunk of users, Microsoft can still price licenses relatively high.

[jjtheblunt]

I've been using Mathematica since it came out in 1988, then off University of Illinois site license (it was developed there), and then keeping a personal hobbyist license live.

The hobbyist license wasn't priced by the year, just outright single charge. Is the by-the-year version you see one with continued upgrades?

[ Edit : the edit directly above answers this. thanks! ]

[7thaccount]

Mathematica is like $3k for a commercial license with the kitchen sink. Matlab can cost that much for like the database toolbox addon or the ML toolbox add-on. Mathematica is cheap in comparison.