WolframScript enables Wolfram Language code to be run from any terminal

here's a quote from the NSF: "reproducibility refers to the ability of a researcher to duplicate the results of a prior study using the same materials as were used by the original investigator. That is, a second researcher might use the same raw data to build the same analysis files and implement the same statistical analysis in an attempt to yield the same results…. Reproducibility is a minimum necessary condition for a finding to be believable and informative".

https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/8/341/341ps12.full

let's say someone has some data and a method to process that data. if they implement it in mathematica, then someone else can do the same implementation in mathematica and attempt to reproduce the results. so what if they had to pay for it? that doesn't affect the reproducibility. it's a barrier maybe, and a small one, but it doesn't make it inherently less reproducible. someone else could take the data and method and implement it in something else, say matlab, sage, octave, or whatever, and attempt to reproduce the results. i know of a researcher who does this very thing. he likes mathematica, but his graduate students use a range of software to do their own work and produce results. he takes their methods and investigates and implements them in mathematica to see if they are reproducible. this is good mathematics and good science. just because mathematica is involved doesn't all of the sudden make everything un-reproducible and bad science.

if you're thinking, but oh, if it's open source, i could crawl through and understand everything the code is doing. but nobody does that. it isn't even feasible in anything but the simplest of simple cases.

> This doesn't mean we should be driving away from reproducibility just because it's lacking in some areas of science.

i didn't say we should. but in all the comments sections of big physics announcements, we don't see people whining about reproducibility. i can't go and reproduce the LIGO experiment in my backyard because it takes huge amounts of money, equipment, and engineering expertise. that's why many things don't compete that well with mathematica. it takes a lot of time, money, and expertise to develop such a software package. the opposing model (open source software) just barely drags along and could disappear at any time as maintainers come and go.

I've never seen a workplace use R or Julia or list them on a job posting outside data science or academia. Julia in particular is missing major components that make it useable, particularly in signal processing.

MATLAB also has the advantage of being useful as a CLI calculator for linear algebra, which is how a lot of engineers use it in their day to day. The REPL's of python and Julia are far too slow for that kind of work, frankly. Especially Julia. the JIT takes forever to warm up. It really doesn't fit into my workflow at all, and I've tried to force it.

Also, Simulink.

Much like Excel, it's easier to get people to program if you can convince them it's not programming.

I remember reporting this to my tutor. He looked at me with a steely gaze and said “That is a very serious allegation to make, young man. Are you willing stand by it?”