

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

Is it because it&#x27;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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xiaoma
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.

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dhbradshaw
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.)

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chatmasta
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.

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e_modad
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.

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ryanobjc
individual version is like $250 or so.

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

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ryanobjc
Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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rpietro
language is proprietary, nothing preventing it from going South overnight

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daly
Try Axiom

