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I didn’t mean to say that nobody uses the software, just that I don’t know anybody who does. Which just makes it hard for me to get a handle on its value.

The question I’d ask those physicists is whether Mathematica does the kinds of things Wolfram claims for it / does things other programming languages can’t do. I wouldn’t be surprised if the answer was “yes,” I’m just not sure.

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For some mathematical work, going from Mathematica to Python/Julia/Octave/Scilab would be a significant step backwards.

This is coming from a pythonista btw. To each their own. Python is a better scripting language, but Mathematica is a better analysis language for a lot of things. Python is catching up in a lot of ways though with Numpy and Tensorflow. I'd say Python's Tensorflow is a lot more mature than Mathematica's neural nets, but Mathematica's symbolic math seems to be world class.

I used mathematica as a graduate physics student. It is an incredibly powerful equation solver and visualizer. I do not think I would very easily be able to do what I was able to do in mathematica in another language. That said I don't use it anymore.

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