Rather than just bashing Stephen's personality and rehashing Cosma Shalizi's driveby on NKOS, can we try and focus on the technical accomplishment that Mathematica represents?
It really is an astounding system. If you enjoy functional programming, the language is super expressive and productive. The integrated libraries are fantastic -- especially if you want to chain together different knowledge domains through a consistent interface and syntax. You can get the entire Wolfram Alpha knowledgebase and curated datasets to use in your programs immediately.
The front-end is just lightyears in front of Jupyter notebooks in just about every conceivable way.
This isn't to hide that there are some frustrating things about the language (like, machine learning development has just stopped dead after a couple of really great years of feature dev...why?) and, especially, the organisation and some of its personalities. But the product -- it really should get a lot more kudos and wow factor based on real accomplishments and features that are live, in the real world.
I love Wolfram stuff.
Could you elaborate on
> The front-end is just lightyears in front of Jupyter notebooks in just about every conceivable way.
I had the opposite experience, but it's a very broad statement and I suspect we took different interpretations of "front-end"
Under what interpretation of "front-end" would Mathematica's front-end be behind of Jupyter notebooks?
Hah, answering a question with a question ;)
A few pain points for me:
- No Markdown support. Yes, there's rich input, but I find it more natural to write prose in a markup language rather than with a rich editor.
- Single "kernel" support. This isn't a criticism of Mathematica per-se: it doesn't care about other languages. But, it's nice to be able to use Jupyter Notebooks with C++, Python, etc.
- Limited UX w.r.t layout. JupyterLab lets me pin outputs, split the view, run a terminal alongside my notebook etc.
- Restricted ecosystem. This is a big one - it's not trivial to write an extension for Mathematica to extend its UX / rich output mechanism. With Jupyter, this is fairly trivial.
Don't get me wrong, they're different tools, and that's why I'm reluctant to engage with "X is better than Y" discussions. Mathematica is vastly unsuited to the kind of analysis / work that I do, whilst I'm sure the same is true of those who swear by Mathematica.
If you like Jupyter more than Mathematica as a front-end you can use wolframscript
https://www.wolfram.com/wolframscript/
as a Jupyter kernel:
https://github.com/WolframResearch/WolframLanguageForJupyter
You can use it with the free (for non-production use) Wolfram Engine: