Mathematica programming – an advanced introduction (2009)

I personally have mixed feelings about Mathematica. Stephen Wolfram has issues, but I don&#x27;t buy software based on the attitude of the creator. Otherwise, many open source projects that I use with some combination of very cranky, irritable, rude, egotistical, and&#x2F;or arrogant people involved would be ruled out as well...<p>Closed source that costs $$$ is definitely an issue - for a while after school it was hard to continue using Mathematica until my employer acquired a site license and I got a home license. In the meantime I tried all of the usual suspects - from open source things (Maxima, Sage, Octave, Julia, and so on...) to other commercial products (e.g., Maple and Matlab). I ended up returning to Mathematica for two reasons: 1) it has a massive standard library, and once you learn the idioms of the library and the language, I found it pretty usable; 2) it has beautiful graphics capabilities.<p>The open source tools are hit-or-miss on the standard library front - some of the libraries are great, some are missing major features, or their implementations are poor. (Yes, it&#x27;s OSS and one can either contribute code or feedback, but often I have a problem to solve NOW - I don&#x27;t have time to wait for the OSS to catch up.)<p>As for the graphics, I&#x27;m not sure what it is about Mathematica visualizations that I like so much, but they look GOOD relative to the others I&#x27;ve tried.<p>At the end of the day though, Mathematica is just one of the useful tools in my toolchain - the others have their plusses and minuses as well. But one thing I&#x27;ve adapted to over the years is that A) sometimes good software costs money, and B) sometimes jerks are involved in creating good software. Neither case is one that I feel is a valid justification for rejecting a software package outright.<p>Edit: It&#x27;s worth noting the time period over which I&#x27;ve been mucking around with Mathematica and the other alternatives I mentioned above. I started seriously using numerical and scientific computing software (including Mathematica) in 1994, so that&#x27;s a 21 year period of wandering around the space trying out things here and there.

Sage is accumulating a lot of math software. Try it at cloud.sagemath.com. An introduction to sage for undergraduates, using linear algebra as the topic focus is at <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gregorybard.com&#x2F;SAGE.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gregorybard.com&#x2F;SAGE.html</a>

I try to avoid Mathematica because Wolfram himself is a self-centered prick and it&#x27;s closed source - it is a shame, too.<p>Matlab&#x27;s strength is doing lots of things for you through its toolboxes; Sage Math is a bloated monster, Maxima is pretty damn good, haven&#x27;t spent any time with Axiom. Octave is pretty good (none of those delicious toolboxes though) and Scilab just &#x27;felt&#x27; wrong (and its Simulink knockoff was atrocious). Mathcad is great, but also expensive and closed - Mathworks kneecapped them by buying the company that made their symbolic engine (and turning it into a toolbox&#x2F;addon for Matlab).<p>OpenModelica I never got far with, but I&#x27;d like to do some multidomain simulation with eventually.<p>If I missed a good CAS, let me know.

I wonder why the creators of Mathematica didn&#x27;t aim for a pure functional language.

Love programming in Mathematica in college but the closed source development and expensive licenses made it a non-starter for me over the years.