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Comment by bmitc | Hacker News Reader

I'm never sure why projects try to claim themselves as a free alternative to Mathematica. For one, they never seem to reach anywhere near the polish and power of Mathematica. And secondly, is Mathematica really that expensive if you use it in your job/industry?

For hobbyists, Mathematica is free on a Raspberry Pi, which probably runs better than any alternative, and has a pretty reasonable price point if you buy the real thing for personal use.

For students/professors, Mathematica is basically already free at most major universities.

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>And secondly, is Mathematica really that expensive if you use it in your job/industry?

If you live in a developing country where the average salary is $50-$300/month and your company's revenue is similarly thin, yes it is really expensive.

I tried to discuss pricing with Mathematica on behalf of one of these companies and after a few initial exchanges to assess our needs, the sales representatives did not even bother getting back to us and started ghosting us.

The world is not limited to wealthy western countries, countries in Africa, Asia and other regions of the world are increasingly aspiring to develop their technology sector by building an ecosystem of engineering companies.

Mathics and similar initiatives are therefore more than welcome. Even in a developed country, there are many reasons not to want to tie yourself to a proprietary tech so central to your operations, especially in today's world. For example, what about if you are a Chinese company and the US treasury decides to blacklist your company or country?

"countries in Africa, Asia and other regions of the world are increasingly aspiring to develop their technology sector by building an ecosystem of engineering companies"

So by basing that ecosystem around open source software where appropriate, these companies and their employees can avoid the lock in and restrictions of commercial software. I'd expect them to be overtaking the tired Western industrial world fairly soon - or at least being a lot more nimble.

I just checked how much a license of Mathematica for Home & Hobby costs.

It's €447 one time purchase, or a €224/year subscription.

The one time purchase does not include updates, so if something breaks with next years macOS update I will probably have to pay for an upgrade again.

This license is pretty pricy for something I just buy for fun, but arguably worth it if you use it often. But I am not allowed to use it for any professional purposes at all. If I just wanted to use it to graph the sales numbers of my side projects (probably not the best tool for the job, but why learn another tool if you have one that does the job?), I would need a professional license which is 10x the price.

Being able to run it on the Raspberry Pi for free is nice, but I assume it is also limited to "personal use".

Mathematica is ridiculously expensive. It's expensive because it's professional software, and there are few alternatives. If you use it daily as part of your job, the price is absolutely worth it, but if you don't, it's just way overpriced.

When I left university, I would have loved to keep using Mathematica, but it was just way too expensive to run it on my laptop, for an app that I would just use a few times per year. And logging into a Raspberry Pi just to use an even slower version of an app that isn't known for being particularly responsive in the first place just isn't something that I care about.

[insert anything] is ridiculously expensive. If you use it the price is absolutely worth it, but if you don't, it's just way overpriced.

Disagreed. Example: Numi.app and Soulver3.app = both are essentially just fancy calculators with built-in unit conversions and a few other convenient features. I use them maybe once a month, but €30 for a lifetime license with no subscription is more than ok for what they are.

I would perhaps say: if it offers you more value (not necessarily financial) than its cost, then it's worth it.

But this is a truism also.

You are misrepresenting my comment by removing essential qualifiers: It's worth it if you use it daily as part of your job.

There are plenty of jobs where Mathematica would be useful occasionally, but not every day. For these cases, the software is overpriced.

It can also be worth it when used outside of jobs and occasionally - in the same way that a bike or a blender or a day at a spa can be worth it. I wouldn’t say that a blender is “ridiculously expensive” because I don’t care much about smoothies.

If I wanted to buy a Mathematica license for my use case (hobby stuff, use it for my job maybe two times a year) it would cost me around 5000€. If that isn't ridiculously expensive, I don't know what else to call it.

I think I misunderstood your first comment - I thought you found the "home and hobby" license ridiculously expensive.

I'm not sure what that 5000€ refers to. The standard licence is 3880+VAT (I guess that's what you meant), the annual one half that price.

If you look at it as

  "hobby stuff" 500
  "use it for my job maybe two times a year" 4500 extra

maybe the "home and hobby" license makes more sense for your use case - use it "cheap" for hobby even though you cannot justify paying the full price for work. That's why that license was introduced in the first place!

One could also say that a 5000€ A0 printer is "ridiculously expensive" because you want to print only a couple of posters. While you would be better off going to a print shop it doesn't necessarily indicate any problem with the pricing of the machine.

Depending where you are and what you income is, €447 is a lot of money to spend on a hobby.

That costs more than a month's rent in some European cities https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/region_prices_by_city?...

Well, in that context one can also say that a €447 pair of shoes is ridiculously expensive, a €447 bike is ridiculously expensive, a €447 telephone is ridiculously expensive, etc.

> €447 pair of shoes is ridiculously expensive

Well, at this point it's not even ridiculously expensive; €100 would be ridiculously expensive already.

> a €447 bike is ridiculously expensive

Nah, a good bike can easily cost as much; it's an investment similar to buying car.

> a €447 telephone is ridiculously expensive

It is and it baffles me people are willing to spend even more.

A pair of shoes, a bike or a phone will be used a lot more, and with no license restrictions, than a hobbyist copy of Mathematica.

> Mathematica is ridiculously expensive

This is something I used to believe.

I am a hobbyist user. Mathematica was not required for my work or for any other interests outside personal curiosity and an ever growing love of math and science.

I’ve made it an indispensable part of my work. A small side-project in Mathematica blossomed into one of the key ways my clients analyze data now.

Mathematica costs less than a dollar a day. It’s always open among the apps on my desktop on both my work Mac and my kitchen Mac.

To stop using Mathematica, you’d have to pry it away from my cold, dead hands. It’s really that great.

"I’ve made it an indispensable part of my work"

And that's why Mathematica is indispensable to you—familiarity and use have made it indispensable.

The trouble is that it's a chicken and egg problem, with the program being so expensive many won't have access to it to try it—some of whom, if they'd had access, would have progressed to your situation.

A program like Mathematica only becomes indispensable to a person after he/she has had access to it for long enough to become familiar with its workings and for the person to actually benefit from the program's features—here that is to provide quick mathematical solutions to problems that would otherwise take a long time or require tedious workings out.

Thus, it's little wonder that so many are looking for cheaper alternatives—as they simply haven't developed the experience necessary to arrive at the same conclusion that you have.

It's unfortunate that's the situation exists and that there aren't more products capable of competing with Mathematica that have a similar UI experience and calculating granularities.

Are you using the hobby license for professional work? Or do they drop the price to less than a dollar a day if you ask nicely?

Licenses that you are allowed to use for commercial activities are a lot more than a dollar a day according to their website.

I agree that Mathematica is extremely powerful, but in my opinion calling it polished is quite a stretch.

The notebook interface has a look and feel as if it was hacked together in two weeks in 2004. Kernel startup and function evaluations can be extremely slow (how the hell did Mathematica 1 run on 1988 hardware?). Sometimes, long-running evaluations can be interrupted, sometimes doing it crashes the kernel. The arcane functional programming language makes writing procedures extremely painful (control flow is handled by nesting If[] functions). Plots are borderline unreadable by default. Customizing them is very complicated and inflexible compared to OOP-based plotting libraries in other languages. Many features don't work at all. I once tried exporting an animated plot as a video file, and most codecs were simply broken. Sometimes PDF exports of plots are Megabyte sized for no good reason.

Instead of fixing such basic stuff, Wolfram keeps adding cloud features that nobody asked for and machine learning stuff that nobody uses. For the vast majority of users, Mathematica 7 is functionally identical to Mathematica 13. Unfortunately, there still is no real alternative, so everyone keeps giving them lots of money for a frankly very unfinished product.

> Plots are borderline unreadable by default

Really? Of all your complaints that one seems the least true, in my experience. I think plots are lovely by default, but then 5% of the time it’s crap and then I’m cursing, with you, at how alien and annoying the whole thing has become.

I used Mathematica in 1988 on a Mac and have been grateful that my employment has given me free access ever since. The notebook interface feels basically the same to me as it did in 1988, when it was an incredible innovation. Now, it is a little annoying.

I also don’t know what feels unfinished about it, but it sounds like you’ve spent more time wrestling with it than me. It has been an incredibly enduring product that still wins at symbolic math. And I also hope open source tools can replace it in my work.

In my opinion, the axes labels are way too small and in a weird location, the lines are too thin, and the default color cycle has many colors that are indistinguishable for people with red–green color blindness (8% of all men). I have been in many meetings where someone could not read some of the Mathematica plots on the slides.

How about defining you own PlotTheme and setting $PlotTheme in init.m? It’s been supported since version 10, I believe.

I agree with your specific comment. And in the more general sense (as I've repeated elsewhere) that user ergonomics of much software sucks big-time.

In the case of red-green (or any) color blindness the simple solution is to provide either a choice of predefined colors and or ways of manually overriding the defaults—and in relative terms the extra programming effort needed to provide this useful functionality is a trivial matter.

Sotware manufacturers really do have a damned hide when they omit such important features especially when the need for them is so obvious.

BTW, I'm not color blind but I've witnessed situations as you've mentioned, so too would have the program's software developers. That they've not attended to the matter makes it all the more annoying.

"Instead of fixing such basic stuff, Wolfram keeps adding cloud features that nobody asked for and machine learning stuff that nobody uses."

Unfortunately, Wolfram is not alone and it's the curse of the software industry. There are hundreds upon hundreds of examples of programs where new usually-unwanted features are added at the expense of unfixed bugs and important features that are badly implemented and need attention but which its developers keep ignoring.

The problem ultimately boils down to us users—first, we don't complain loudly enough about obvious problems and second, we're all too taken in with promises from marketing departments about the benefits the new glitzy features will bring but which rarely live up to expectations.

What we don't collectively realize is that poorly finished software with bad user ergonomics is enormously costly to society in terms of wasted human effort and lost productivity when tallied across millions of users.

I qualify that comment from my own experience both as an IT professional and as someone who has run an IT department. Personally over the years I've lost thousands of hours trying to get buggy or poorly implemented software to do some of the most basic of core functions that ought to work properly from the outset. Same goes for typical users who are forever calling on my department's help desk to solve problems that ought not exist.

> For students/professors, Mathematica is basically already free at most major universities.

Just because someone else is writing the check doesn't mean it's free. Case in point, the pricing for an individual Mathematica license for use at a college or university ranges from $722/yr to $9k[1], with the customary confusion about what is actually included.

[1] https://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/pricing/colleges-univers...

> For students/professors, Mathematica is basically already free at most major universities.

When I was still in academia I avoided close source because I want my research to be accessible. It does make a difference if you need to go through some strange license portal to activate your university license or if you can just install it in one line.

For me that meant that my scripts run in octave as good as in matlab, if this was feasible (and of course many packages exist only for matlab).

For me, free as in freedom is the primary concern. A proprietary programming language seems a bit ridiculous. I don't see myself paying for a programming language either, though. Libre and gratis are the norm in this space, so going against that sticks out in a bad way. It's like text editors and web browsers. We've had good free options for a long time. Anyone trying to push a non-free option might as well be giving out malware. That malware isn't appealing whether it has a pricetag or not.

There is an interesting article about the reasons why Wolfram decided against open source and why their products would not have been possible otherwise: https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-op...

As much as I don’t like it either, I can understand their perspective and actually believe that it might have been very hard to create and sustain such a comprehensive, thoughtfully and consistently designed language with an open source model. But it may be interesting to see if there are projects of similar scale with similar requirements that thrive (long-term) on a free and open source model.

Most of the points in the article are for centralized development, which has nothing to do with open source.

This! I am coding something right now that Mathematica would honestly make 100x easier, but I refuse to use it because I want my software to be FOSS, and not depend on a proprietary language.

I respect Wolfram's enginuity, but I resent his ego for keeping us all out of his walled garden.

I love Mathematica, though I don't use it today.

Free tools have taken over programming, and I doubt that cost is the main reason. I don't know if there are any proprietary programming tools in widespread use any more. The same benefits might apply to software for "the rest of us."

Outside of truly enlightened organizations, the cost ends up being just high enough to trigger all sorts of wasteful habits such as: Management approval, dealing with the purchasing department (on a recurring basis these days), using outdated versions, shared licenses, centralized installations, node locking, separate "development" and "run-time" environments, and so forth.

For one specialized app that I use at my workplace, it costs a few man-hours per year to renew the subscription. The license server is on a firewalled domain, maintained by IT, so I can't use the software at home unless I carry a computer back and forth every day. On my bike.

Use of that software tacitly assumes certain work habits such as doing your work mostly in one place.

The cost frustrates sharing. If you want to share something you made, your victim has to buy their own license to use it.

In the time that it takes to hash out the purchase of software X, I can have my entire toolchain (Python, Arduino, WxMaxima, etc) on every computer that I touch: In my office, the labs, and at home. This has radically changed how I incorporate (mostly) Python into my life at work and at home.

> I don't know if there are any proprietary programming tools in widespread use any more.

Isn’t Xcode is a widely used programming tool?

Ah, good call. I admit that my claim is based on having periodically googled "top programming languages" over the years. So a few proprietary tools may have fallen through my sieve.

Another obvious example is the CUDA toolkit - unless you don't consider it a programming tool.

This might be a case similar to embedded development, which has seen much slower adoption of free tooling.

And I have a pretty broad definition of "programming," so by all rights I should have mentioned Excel.

Mathematica has so much closed-source hidden stuff under the hood that there's a question of correctness. I've certainly found bugs / wrong mathematical facts before.

There's a question of correctness for any system, no matter how closed or open.

But the process of answering that question is vastly different.

Yes, but having results verified with multiple different software increases the chance that correctness problems will noticed sooner.

Can you share an example of it getting math wrong?

Here is an article from 2014 by a (group of) mathematicians who used Mathematica extensively in their research describing the problems they had with Mathematica when trying to calculate the determinant of a Matrix containing large integers (on the order of 10k digits). The bug was reported in Mathematica 7 and was still there in Mathematica 10.

https://www.ams.org/notices/201410/rnoti-p1249.pdf

Back when I was using Mathematica a lot (2005-2010ish) the Mathematica usenet group kept an archive of all errors in Mathematica people had found, but it seems to have disappeared off the Internet.

If you browse the [bugs] tag in mathematica.stackexchange.com you'll find a few as well (although admittedly many of the issues there are user errors rather than Mathematica getting it wrong)

thank for the link to that nice article; it also has some other examples of symbolic math packages getting the wrong result

There used to be another answer here, with a specific link, but now it's gone. I thought I upvoted it, but I'm worried my fumble fingers on my tiny phone downvoted it by accident.

The [bugs] tag on the Mathematica stack exchange has 1900+ questions https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bugs

Here are two that I found:

the character table of some finite groups weren't square https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/q/252775/7936 this one makes me really nervous as this implies there's not unit testing for the most obvious checks (it's a theorem that the character table must be square and the check is trivial to implement)

conjugate transpose didn't do anything to vectors https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/q/258165/7936

There are plenty more where Mathematica produces the wrong antiderivative or limit.

Thanks for this link; I think your reply is the one I saw and then couldn't see, but now it's back. I may be misunderstanding how HN works.

When I went back to uni, a lot of my classes had us using Mathematica. While the software is fine, I found Steven Wolfram's relentless promotion a bit off-putting.

Felt a lot like P. T. Barnum somehow and I wasn't really comfortable being a customer of someone who made me feel like P. T. Barnum was selling me something.

Thanks; you have aptly expressed the vibe I got trying to read through New Kind of Science.

> For students/professors, Mathematica is basically already free at most major universities.

I think this is usually an on-premise license, and not a license to use it on your own computer offline.

You can use it on the cloud. I'm not sure what else you can do with such a license.

> And secondly, is Mathematica really that expensive if you use it in your job/industry?

i would pay double/triple the price if it was open source. i shudder at the thought of doing scientific work with help of a magic black box

>I'm never sure why projects try to claim themselves as a free alternative to Mathematica.

In this case it's an open-source project reimplementing Mathematica (though technically only the Wolfram language).

>For hobbyists, Mathematica is free on a Raspberry Pi,

Also Wolfram Engine (which due to previous technicality is closer to Mathics) is free anywhere.

>And secondly, is Mathematica really that expensive if you use it in your job/industry?

The point isn't the price but but that an important software used in academic research is closed source. Those that value open science want to have a way to reproduce results using free tools.

TIL: Mathematica is free on Raspberry Pi. https://www.wolfram.com/raspberry-pi/

Yea, it's a pretty awesome thing, in my opinion. It ran a bit slow on the old Raspberry Pis, but the Raspberry Pi 4 is obviously much more powerful.

and Minecraft is also free on RPi https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/edition/pi

And the free version has a neat open source fork that adds features: https://github.com/MCPI-Revival/minecraft-pi-reborn

Mathematica is prohibitively expensive. I work at a public technical university in Europe and we have no licenses for mathematica.

> Mathematica is basically already free at most major universities.

As a physicist I can say this is definitely not true

You’re not wrong.

It’s just the idea of “what if I accidentally turn my dream hobby into a success?” and “how do I even call lawyers?” and “is any of this worth investing in, on balance?”

it's nice you find it cheap, because i find it very very expensive.

One may want an open source tool for such a foundational requirement.

One may decide that it’s too unstable or dangerous to base one’s primary tools in proprietary software land.

I have precisely this concern in my fields of work.

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