Mathematica 7 compares to other languages

[bearophileHUGS at lycos.com]

Mathematica has some powerful symbolic processing capabilities, for
example the integrals, etc. It also contains many powerful algorithms,
often written in few lines of code. And its graphic capabilities are
good. It also shows some surprising ways to integrate and manipulate
data, for example here you can see how you can even put images into
formulas, to manipulate them:
http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/ref/ImageApply.html

So when you need an algorithm, you can often find it already inside,
for example in the large Combinatorics package. So it has WAY more
batteries included, compared to Python. I'd like to see something as
complete as that Combinatorics package in Python.

But while the editor of (oldish) Mathematica is good to quickly input
formulas (but even for this I have found way better things, for
example the editor of GraphEQ  www.peda.com/grafeq/ that is kilometers
ahead), it's awful for writing *programs* even small 10-line ones.
Even notepad seems better for this.

For normal programming Python is light years more handy and better
(and more readable too), there's no contest here. Python is also
probably faster for normal programs (when built-in functions aren't
used). Python is much simpler to learn, to read, to use (but it also
does less things).

A big problem is of course that Mathematica costs a LOT, and is closed
source, so a mathematician has to trust the program, and can't inspect
the code that gives the result. This also means that any research
article that uses Mathematica relies on a tool that costs a lot (so
not everyone can buy it to confirm the research results) and it
contains some "black boxes" that correspond to the parts of the
research that have used the closed source parts of Mathematica, that
produce their results by "magic". As you can guess, in science it's
bad to have black boxes, it goes against the very scientific method.

Bye,
bearophile