I've only ever seen or heard of it being used by Stephen Wolfram. It must be fun to have a huge engineering team to help support what is essentially a pet project.

Maybe they will someday release something with general availability and competitive pricing, but for now it seems to be behind a walled garden. But I wouldn't worry. If Wolfram Language truly exposes any novel concepts, then it is only a matter of time until the open source community implements those features for everyone else to use.

It's a shame, but I'm skeptical Wolfram will ever see the inherent value of getting real software into the world. From what I've seen, he would much rather build proprietary toys that only he can use, rather than building open-source tools that can be ubiquitous.

If Wolfram has cool toys and isn't willing to share, then so be it. The open source community can build our own cool toys.

I use the language and I enjoy it. As a physicist, I find a lot of value in (1) its ability to do math, (2) its powerful functional nature, and (3) its broad and well-documented standard library. To me, these advantages are well worth the $80 student price I paid years ago. I know that some of the community here dislikes the language for costing money, being closed source, and being marketed by Stephen Wolfram, but to me, it's worth it. I'm often impressed at how quickly I can accomplish complex data analysis tasks. I think the fact that the built-in libraries are consistent in their architecture/documentation adds a surprisingly large amount of value because it makes it easy to do new things quickly.

And of course, I find value in other languages too.

Angelo Pesce (aka c0de517e) has written about using it as a rendering engineer on his blog[0]. I've heard of others using it in similar scenerios as well, but don't have a link to provide for them.

[0]: http://c0de517e.blogspot.com/2013/10/wolframs-mathematica-10... (among a couple other posts about using it for specific tasks. He also spends some time defending it on there as well)

you're not the target market - every scientist and mathematician initially and recently home hobbyists. BTW once you leave uni, paying to be productive is the easiest decision you'll ever make - half arsed and free isn't all it's cracked up to be.