> The open source tools that exist are indeed inferior and that's why I cannot use them.
Can you be more specific? It might be interesting to hear if people found viable solutions to specific concerns.
Can you be more specific? It might be interesting to hear if people found viable solutions to specific concerns.
At one point I was using SymPy and I wanted to invert a symbolic matrix, a rather small one but it had some off-diagonal elements. This took a few seconds in mathematica, after a few hours in SymPy I had to halt the execution of that line. I never got around to look at the code to see what caused it, probably some simple bug, but that's another reason.
I have used Sage somewhat as well. It has more features than SymPy, for what I do professionally. Still some features are missing that I would need. But this might also just be a problem of the amount of experience I have with these tools.
The last problem is that these are much slower than mathematica. I would certainly not say that I'm a good programmer, so my code is probably very slow and badly written. In mathematica I have done some calculations that take days to complete, but they were quite heavy calculations. For these projects I could in principal have used SymPy, I know it has enough features, but with how much slower it is, it would be useless (unless I was able to improve my code to compensate).
With more experience I could give more specific concerns.