Mathematica user here. It is nice that the Wolfram language has an insane amounts of builtin features (graphics, charts, massive amount of math functionality, tables, database stuff, GPU, 3D printing, blockchain, audio analysis, web scraping, one load function that can interpret over 100 different file formats...etc) it is insanely powerful for a lot of things.
Some of the drawbacks are that it is closed source, costs money (although cheap as far as this kind of software generally goes), but most importantly the succinct benefits of the language can make it painful to deal with. Yes, I can probably write 3 lines to do something that would take a 1/2 page of Python, but I first need to know which of thousands of functions to use and the eccentricities of the language. I'm sure Wolfram employees are that skilled, but I'm not and will not be anytime soon.
With that being said, I spent a few hours writing a notebook demonstrating key fundamental and scientific formulas in my industry this weekend. It was easy and the resulting code, pictures, and graphs look fantastic. I exported it as a PDF for others to use. Even the console is pretty cool. I think it would be a very popular language and environment if it was free and open source. Another problem is running something in production. My solution is to not even bother and just write the final solution in Julia if I need it. I think Mathematica really makes sense though if you're at a lab where everyone else uses it and can pass around Notebooks. In short I really like having it around, but don't like dealing with licensing issues.
Some of the drawbacks are that it is closed source, costs money (although cheap as far as this kind of software generally goes), but most importantly the succinct benefits of the language can make it painful to deal with. Yes, I can probably write 3 lines to do something that would take a 1/2 page of Python, but I first need to know which of thousands of functions to use and the eccentricities of the language. I'm sure Wolfram employees are that skilled, but I'm not and will not be anytime soon.
With that being said, I spent a few hours writing a notebook demonstrating key fundamental and scientific formulas in my industry this weekend. It was easy and the resulting code, pictures, and graphs look fantastic. I exported it as a PDF for others to use. Even the console is pretty cool. I think it would be a very popular language and environment if it was free and open source. Another problem is running something in production. My solution is to not even bother and just write the final solution in Julia if I need it. I think Mathematica really makes sense though if you're at a lab where everyone else uses it and can pass around Notebooks. In short I really like having it around, but don't like dealing with licensing issues.