Mathematica isn't being used at all? That's surprising. Mathematica is wonderful. I wonder what's holding it back?
It doesn't seem to have a package manager. Could it be that simple?
It doesn't seem to have a package manager. Could it be that simple?
If you need to call one of the built-in pieces of Magic (TM) then Mathematica is OK, but if you want to build something new that needs to interface with literally anything outside of Mathematica, then Mathematica is a PITA.
The interface was trivial.
If you have a small script that makes a single one-off call to Mathematica, and the interface already exists for your language, which it probably doesn't, even if you're using an extremely popular language, and even though you're paying hundreds of dollars a year just for PERSONAL use, then things can be ok. But if you want to make a bunch of calls and keep the program running reliably then you're SOL.
Oh, and don't even think about deploying. It will cost you so much that it's more cost-effective to just rewrite the thing or do the work of switching out with a different library/tool.
In this case, I wrote that interface and open sourced it. http://library.wolfram.com/infocenter/MathSource/585/
I have no idea how it compares price-wise to SAS?
Check out github.com/boemska/h54s. I wouldn't normally post it like this, but SAS comes up so rarely that I figured if you're on HN and you use SAS, then you'll probably be interested. The more the merrier.