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by bborud 1457 days ago
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.
1 comments
Archit3ch 1457 days ago
> 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.

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bborud 1457 days ago
> 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.

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