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Comment by oakridge | Hacker News Reader

If I remember correctly, Mathematica started the notion of having a notebook interface when working with code, Theodore Gray even has the patent for this [0]. Even though the post reads like a longform ad for Mathematica and the Wolfram language, I do agree the notion of code written to present an idea/solution as a story. Sadly, with Jupyter notebooks being free/open source and compatible with other language kernels, there seems to be a decline in the mindshare for Mathematica and its notebook interface among researchers.

[0] Patent US 8407580 B2 - Method and system for presenting input expressions and evaluations of the input expressions on a workspace of a computational system (https://www.google.com/patents/US8407580)

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Mathematica is a great prototyping language for people who know mathematics. It is the equivalent of Microsoft Excel. The problem is when you want to do something beyond that you will probably rewrite it in something else. And that something else is increasingly being Python.

I do like the term "computational essay". It describes a way of presenting information. While "notebook" feels more to me a set of calculations that may or may not be commented and don't have a set structure.

It would be neat if we had a standard notebook notation or system that would subsume all of these competing standards. Unfortunately it would probably end up like this https://xkcd.com/927/

>The problem is when you want to do something beyond that you will probably rewrite it in something else. And that something else is increasingly being Python.

You aren't going to use your Python code in your Jupyter notebook in production, are you? Jupyter is for exploration and exposition. You're going to have to rewrite it anyway.

I didn't say that you would translate a Mathematica workbook into an iPython notebook.

What is it sad that Mathematica is getting displaced by free and $free open source alternatives, which use high quality programming languages?

This is happening, as a direct consequence of Stephen Wolfram's ego, not because there's something inherently wrong with Mathematica, the language (now renamed to "Wolfram language"), or the ecosystem.

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