Maple vs mathematica5/3/2023 What is trivial to accomplish in a few seconds or minutes in Excel, typically takes hours of jumping through hoops with Mathematica to achieve a result that is almost always inferior. And the question I always end up asking myself is: "why on God's green earth would anyone in their right mind try to use Mathematica for a task like that?". I have seen several attempts to get Mathematica to do the kind of thing that Excel can do effortlessly. Let's take a simple example: spreadsheets. But, often times what you need is a tool with a specific purpose, like a screwdriver, which will make it much easier to complete the task you have in mind. Mathematica has developed into something like a Swiss Army knife, a general purpose tool you can use for almost any purpose. And at this point we could now queue up a 15 minute informercial featuring examples of applications from Astronomy to Zoology.īut just because you can do something in Mathematica doesn't mean you should: there are often better alternatives. It's a general purpose tool, limited in its capabilities only by your imagination. Now I have a theory that the generally held view in WR is that Mathematica is for any kind of programming task you can conceive of. Which brings me to the subject of this post: what is Mathematica for? Because unless can answer that question, you can't answer the earlier one. But in order to maintain your competitive position you have to be crystal clear in your understanding of what the value proposition is, and why customers will (continue to) pay for your product. The answer to that question is, of course, yes. To which, I suppose, the answer might be: "Are you quite sure that is inevitable? Are there not examples of for-profit products that are so good they are able to maintain market share in the face of cost-free alternatives?". But I rather suspect otherwise and instead tend to believe that Mathematica is losing influence and relevance, regardless of whatever I may think of the product.Īnother response might be: "Of course we are losing market share to license-free, direct competitor products. It could be, for example, that the downward trend in Mathematica interest is a reflection of a decision by WR to increase prices over time, to maximize profits, i.e. Now this "analysis" is of course over-simplistic. Or perhaps I should say, more accurately, its a challenge for proprietary mathematical programming languages: Its a general problem for mathematical programming languages. For example, here's the comparable chart for Matlab: Firstly this is not just a Mathematica issue. And someone, somewhere, in WR needs to be asking the question I am posing in this post, if they are seriously hoping to check that trend and reverse it. You don't need a model to figure out the long term trend in that time series. I realize that I am possibly the only Mathematica user to suffer from existential angst for the product, but still, its worth pausing to ask the question, what is Mathematica for? Meaning, what is its purpose?īut for those of you pragmatists tempted to roll your eyes and just get on with using it, let me motivate the question with a chart:
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