Why don't developers in the Bay Area use Mathematica?

5 points·pasteurquadrant··12 comments

Is it because it's not marketed to developers? Is it because of price? Is there a need for a general purpose data analysis platform?

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The "starter" edition is $1,000 and the standard edition is $2,500.

That pretty much kills any sort of use for side projects or lifestyle businesses until after getting significant traction...by which time most people realize python and numpy/scipi is plenty good enough.

Mathematica is free on the Raspberry Pi.

(Of course I'm not saying you want to base a business on that, but just that it's a cool way to get Mathematica and play with it.)

Pretty clearly the issue is that it's proprietary. It's astounding this is still the case. Has Wolfram ever given his reasoning behind this? Presumably he wants to capture enterprise customers, but there are other ways to do that (optimized compilers, specialized featuresets, virtual machines, IDE licensing, support, etc.) In this day and age, there is no reason for a programming language to be closed source.

My big problem is the price. It's just outrageous for software that I just want to hack on something every once in a while.

individual version is like $250 or so.

Only for nonprofessionals ($295). For commercial use it's much more expensive: http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/pricing/industry-individu...

Yeah.

Now if I was establishing a hedge fund, maybe it might be worth it?

But then don't expect employees to learn/work with Mathematica in their free time or between jobs.

The fact that it's proprietary, closed-source software probably doesn't help.

Just wondering, do you see this more outside of the Bay/Valley or in other countries?

language is proprietary, nothing preventing it from going South overnight

Try Axiom

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