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by kgwgk
1457 days ago
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> Whether or not Mathematica is a better language is irrelevant as it doesn't have the properties required a large community contributing value for free. The issue is that other languages which were better and more appropriate for scientific computing _had_ those properties. Or maybe these properties are very specific to python and then an open-source mathematica wouldn't have made a difference either. > And it isn't like Mathworks didn't miss the boat too. But they are still an order of magnitude more successful than Wolfram Research. Depends on your definition of success, of course. You focus on adoption but that's not the only goal. The company is an order of magnitude larger but that doesn't make the product an order of magnitude better. |
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In terms of adoption Mathematica is even less of a success than if you measure financially. And adoption is a key factor when evaluating whether or not you want to use a programming language for non-trivial projects. It impacts your ability to recruit, access to knowledge (books, forums, evolved practices), usable solutions to common problems (libraries) and even more or less existential questions like whether or not the language will be maintained. Python ticks all of those boxes. Mathematica partially ticks perhaps one of those boxes. And note that this is before we even consider if Python is any good as a language.
If you were to invest in developing a non-trivial system in Mathematica, how enthusiastic do you think investors would be if you nailed your flag to the Mathematica ship? It would not represent good risk management.
Then there's where things are heading. The number of jobs as "data scientist" or "statistician" of some description is growing sharply. It may gain Mathematica a trickle of new users. But the really big gains have been for languages like Python or Julia. Worse still, people tend to move away from software like Mathematica or Matlab, moving to languages like Python and Julia. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if just the growth in Julia alone over the past couple of years is greater than the total paying userbase of Mathematica.
Single digit, or even low double digit growth in a field that has doubled a few times in the same period isn't success. It is everyone else outrunning you. Fast. And I have seen up close and personal how people who find themselves in that situation will rationalize it with "but we're growing".
Is it a success that it is "good"? For some value of good? Well, a lot of people think Lisp is good. And yet after being around for many decades it is still so hard to find developers to maintain Lisp codebases. I've seen about half a dozen major systems written in Lisp being scrapped once one or two key employees leave. Sure, the systems may qualify as good, even great - but that doesn't help when it becomes a business liability? In the real world it doesn't.
I would have loved for Mathematica to succeed. But it hasn't. And I suspect it won't. Even if it were open sourced right now, I seriously doubt it would bear much fruit the first decade or so. If at all, since the big audiences are focused elsewhere.