For me this software project is one of the most admirable. The combination of the quality, expressiveness of the language, uniformity of the environment, cool algorithms and rich visualizations is a geek's delight. It is a pity that since I finished my university there is almost no place for this beautiful software project in my day to day life.
MMA is a fantastic bit of software. It's my secret weapon for lots of tasks, including prototyping algorithms, data manipulation (it absolutely excels at this), visualisation and all sorts of miscellaneous investigatory tasks. I'd love to use it at work but as a Home Edition user my license prohibits this. Were I to accidentally start it at my day job, I'd use it for converting data between various formats, processing it, manipulating it and writing it back again, like a gigantic and insanely powerful interactive awk replacement. Since I maxed out the RAM on my laptop I now have it run at startup so it's always there for back-of-the-envelope stuff.
I used it extensively in designing my side project synth[1], where I used its visualisation capabilities to figure out everything from panning algorithms to delay lines. It earned its keep most often late at night when I was tired and trying to figure out daytime-simple-but-nighttime-hard routines. The Manipulate[] function is really good for this, as it shows you the output of a function as you drag the inputs up and down. I also used it for turning mathematical formulae into C code - the CForm[] function does this very well.
It's also a great way to experiment with functional programming, since that's how it mostly likes to operate.
I reckon there's a lot of places you could use it, but it's too expensive to justify. I don't really care if it's open source or not, but I'd like Stephen Wolfram to have an epiphany on pricing and realise he could sell ten times as many Home Edition copies at a quarter of the price. Its adoption is absolutely held up by its sky high price.
Anyone with further interest in it should check out the Wolfram blog[2] and one of the friendliest StackExchange communities out there[3]
You make it sound like MMA is better than Matlab for even numerical work. Is this true? For example, would machine learning algorithms be better code in MMA than Matlab? Matlab right now dominates engineering and in particular machine learning.
Matlab is all over finance as well. I haven't used it personally so I can't comment. A lot of quant finance is matrix driven, something which Matlab was made for. Mathematica is perhaps a bit more algebraic and general purpose, but again I don't know much about Matlab's capabilities.
I typically use Mathematica to prototype ideas. When they pan out, I integrate them with existing code written in c or Python. That Mathematica excels at symbolic manipulation as well as numerical solutions while having excellent visualization tools makes it invaluable.
In particular I love to build up some complicated function of many variables and wrap a Plot[] command in a Manipulate[] command so that I can drag the slider bars around and see how the shape of the function changes. This allow for me to get an intuitive understanding of the problem.
I use it mostly for exploratory data analysis. I'm pretty quick with making plots in it (I've used it since v1.2), so I tend to use it for reading in a data set, and them playing around with it. It can handle datasets in the hundreds of thousands of points (still in memory) pretty quickly. You can plot 200k points a series without it slowing down.
On those rare occasions I need to solve equations or do some calculus, there's nothing better.
Me too. I still use it quite frequently. One example where I've used it many times is to debug encryption algorithms. Mathematica can usually handle the most natural form of the Algorithm allowing you to compare the results with optimized low level code.
Given symbolic manipulation, Mathematica allows you to frame your problem without stating how to solve it, even though it would nearly always need some help. I often do the math by hand anyways beforehand for the purpose and to understand what is going on, but Mathematica subsequently allows automating and easier maintenance.
While this could be an extensive debate, I prefer Mathematica to Matlab whenever there is an option. I am a heavy user of both, though have never used Symbolic toolbox in Matlab. It starts a lot more complex in Mathematica, but becomes significantly more powerful shortly thereafter.
Agreed. Wouldn't it be lovely if it were pre-installed on Macs, so more people had access to it? I'm sure Apple could afford it, and they share a lot of history (wasn't Mathematica pre-installed on Next machines? I know Jobs came up with the name at least).
