Mathematica 7 compares to other languages

[Stef Mientki]

Jon Harrop wrote:
> Xah Lee wrote:
>   
>> And on this page, there are sections where Mathematica is compared to
>> programing langs, such as C, C++, Java, and research langs Lisp,
>> ML, ..., and scripting langs Python, Perl, Ruby...
>>     
>
> Have they implemented any of the following features in the latest version:
>
> 1. Redistributable standalone executables.
>
> 2. Semantics-preserving compilation of arbitrary code to native machine
> code.
>
> 3. A concurrent run-time to make efficient parallelism easy.
>
> 4. Static type checking.
>
> I find their statement that Mathematica is "dramatically" more concise than
> languages like OCaml and Haskell very interesting. I ported my ray tracer
> language comparison to Mathematica:
>
>   
<snip>

Mathematica (and MatLab) have a few large advantages over python / scipy 
/ sage
1- although normally the cost a huge amount of money, students gets them 
(almost) for nothing (reminds me of a drug dealer ;-)
2- MatLab is thé industrial standard
3- Wolfram's and Mathworks websites are a huge source of (simple) 
theory  and examples
4- a large number of publishers only accept articles based on commercial 
packages like MatLab / Labview
5- they form alliances if they come too close together ( e.g. MatLab and 
LabView)

So how does a small community like the Python / Scipy / Sage community,
which it's  enormous diversity / induviduality (if I don't like one tiny 
detail, I'll start something completely new),
ever think they are going to beat those commercial packages,
even if the product, is technical speaking, much better ?
Well I still have some hope,
the recently published MatPlotLib documentation / galery is a good example.

just my 1 cent (considering there's a recession),
cheers,
Stef