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I absolutely hate Wolfram's online workbook UI. No matter how careful I am I end up breaking it in so many ways. Delete that image of a horse? Too bad, have to refresh the page to get it back. Click enter incorrectly? That new line can never be deleted now. Want to format your document at all? Good luck.

I subscribed to their online offering when it originally came out, but immediately canceled because the UI is just so far behind its desktop competitors, like Maple, and even Matlab. I want to support this software, it has great potential, but they need to sit down and really rethink how it's put together and delivered to the user.

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Maple makes me sad. They had an amazingly effective streamlined GUI circa 2000, a native Windows app which launched significantly faster than the built-in Microsoft calculator tool, and then felt like an upgraded terminal-style REPL with all of math at your fingertips. It had capable plotting with nice embedded graphics, great built in documentation with fast search, etc. It was rock solid, I don’t think I crashed it once. As a high school student, it was an amazing tool for me.

Then they decided to hop on the Java bandwagon, and rewrote their whole UI using some kind of cross-platform Java GUI toolkit. App startup time went from like a tenth of a second to like 30 seconds (at least, that was my subjective impression at the time). Every part of the GUI was laggy and glitchy, it crashed regularly, the documentation was reorganized and much more confusing, etc.

The big-ticket feature additions which supposedly justified the rewrite were some gimmicky stuff for writing formulas in a more standard-math-typography way instead of as plain text, plus some related handwriting recognition thingy, but this ended up being slow, confusing, and ineffective, and cluttering up the rest of the interface.

I use Maple 16 (I haven't bothered buying any of the newer versions) and it has the Java GUI. The GUI is pretty bad, but if you make sure you work in worksheet mode rather than document mode, you get the old style at least. I also turn off the sidebar. I don't find it to be too bad on my Macs.

I still use Maple mainly because of familiarity. I've been using it since the 90s. I'm a contributor to SymPy, but even then I can think through the problem quicker using Maple.

I used a version of Maple that shipped with both the Java GUI and the native one. It was amazing how much faster the native GUI started and ran.

This was before I learned "real" programming, so I actually stuck with the Java GUI to get the pretty-printed math formula editor. Still, maybe that experience caused me to avoid writing Java programs later on...

However many Java desktop applications are bad, mainly because developers don't care.

- No setting of the platform's L&F

- Everything is done on the main thread

- No care is taken about how to write GC friendly code and data structures

- No attention to eye candy

It is like having Assembly developers cry at the shitty performance of C compilers in the early 80's and blame the language.

I had the same experience, using Matlab in college in the early 2000s was great. But the upside of its decline is that it motivated me to pick up a more general systems programming language for scientific computing work.

The problem I have is that there is at least one Matlab toolbox I haven't been able to find an open source alternative. I use parts of the System Identification toolbox, but the parts I use aren't the parts that are implemented in the Octave one I found. There are tools in it that will do a transfer function estimate and various things with frequencies that I haven't found an alternative. I've bought the text that covers the toolbox and sometime when I have the time, I'll try and implement it.

Have you tried SageMath and/or its cloud service with Jupyter notebooks?

* http://www.sagemath.org

* https://cloud.sagemath.com

(disclaimer: I'm the founder of SageMath and SageMathCloud) People keep asking me about the comparison. Wolfram Programming Lab does indeed appear to be similar in some ways to SMC/Python/Jupyter Notebooks. I think SMC/Python/Jupyter is a better choice for college teaching because (1) the healthy and rapidly growing and improving open source ecosystem, (2) that Python is also useful for a huge amount outside of mathematics, (3) SMC is cheaper than Wolfram Programming Lab and of course Python is free forever, (4) SMC has realtime collaboration (multiple people editing the same doc at once), history recording of all edits, and better snapshots, where Wolfram doesn't have any of that, (5) SMC supports a full Unix shell, anything you can install there, and also LaTeX, (6) the course management in SMC is much more developed.

When you mentioned some desktop programs with less frustrating UIs you forgot to include Wolfram Mathematica. :)

For a long time, Undo didn't work properly on the notebook interface for Desktop Mathematica. In fact, a lot of their tooling is pretty terrible. It's a shame, because it's a really interesting and powerful language (a lot different than matlab).

Same experience. Would love to use this over Matlab but the UI is painful.

checkout www.jasymchat.com, it is a Matlab alternative for students.

It may be prudent to announce that you run something when announcing it as an alternative. Just putting that out there :)

fair point :) it is really just a front-end I built for Jasymca (http://webuser.hs-furtwangen.de/~dersch/jasymca2/indexEN.htm...), with some minor modifications.

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