Well, that doesn't sound too bad. But this is a high enough barrier for Mathematica to not see wide spread use.

I don't remember what the pricing has been throughout the years. But I do remember that for some of the time I couldn't really afford Mathematica. And the license I wanted was also a bit too expensive to justify for a piece of software that only I would be using within an organization.

Because it is also about enough other people around you not being able to justify the expense. And about companies not wanting to pay a lot of money for licenses so they can lock their computations into an ecosystem that is very small.

Mathematica is, in the computing world, pretty irrelevant. And I'm being generous when I say "pretty": I have never encountered it in any job or even in academia. People know of it. They just don't use it for work.

It would have been nice if the language and the runtime had been open source. But Wolfram didn't want to go in that direction. That's a perfectly fine choice to make. But it does mean that as a language, Mathematica will never be important. Nor will knowing how to program in it be a marketable skill.

(To Stephen Wolfram it really doesn't matter. He obviously makes a good living. I'm not sure I'd bother with the noise and stress coming from open sourcing something)

While I'm not sure the particular price point is the biggest problem here, the student license pricing doesn't feel seem that great either. The language is hard enough to learn, and most students won't have time to figure out if they want to buy it with a 15-day trial. They'd probably need half a semester at the very least, unless it's a required part of the curriculum. In the rare case where a student is already familiar enough to know they want it, then four years of $75/year is $300... at that point they may as well just pay $390 for a perpetual personal license, so they can at least keep opening their files in the future.

That said, the parent was talking about it being expensive for use in industry. Personal and student licenses aren't relevant there.

It still creates a class of haves and have-nots which prevents forming a community.

Plus you buy a version of it, and then someone else is on another version, and you don't have the same features, and the tiny community is fragmented.

I’d like to use it sporadically, but they charge a lot for people in academia, and for my use case it’s simply not worth it.

I’m using xcas now, it’s working pretty well for my humble needs.

It's also free on raspberry pi

My thought is that licenses were similarly cheap for historical programming tools like Turbo Pascal and Visual Basic. My dad got me Turbo Pascal for my birthday, for $39, after reading about it in the Wall Street Journal.

But it seems like the proprietary languages have all withered, regardless of price. Even $195 for Mathematica is an obvious concession to this trend. I don't ever remember it being that cheap.

I could write an essay on the benefits of free tooling, but enough has already been written. I'll spare you the slop. ;-)

Didn’t they also bundle something for free with Raspberry Pi OS?

Ok fuck it. Bought the year!