Wolfram Mathematica

Opmerkingen: Amazing. The capabilities are honestly mind blowing, especially when using the internal scripting language properly.

Pluspunten: I used Mathematica daily for at least 10 years daily while working in sciences and, I have to admit, the power of this package is phenomenal. It is best known for the analytic symbolic computations, but also progressed in the domain of numerical computations. In the past, it couldn't solve PDEs efficiently, but now it can do that so well, that I don't use Matlab anymore.

Minpunten: Can't really say anything here. I used the academic license. If I used my own, it would be the price, probably.

Opmerkingen: As I am doing my research in the field of Quantum electron transportation calculations, it's very easy to do all my calculations and most important thing is that it helps us a lot to analyze all my results well. As we solve the matrices which are having a higher degree, it doesn't matter since we have Mathematica. It simplifies everything, all electron transportation calculation we have. because other methods, such as the Green Function method and Scattering methods are much more complex!

Pluspunten: It's easy to use as it provides more helpful manuals in the Wolfram site. If you can not understand some code, then you may click on 'help' and very easily you can find the meaning of the respective code. Plus, there are many more functions available to analyze, to do much harder calculations, to draw graphs, etc. It helps a lot in our Quantum Mechanics projects as once we analyzed the Icing Model using Mathematica.

Minpunten: To be honest, I like almost everything in Wolfram Mathematica. The appearance of the software is great, and the work is very good and there are many more advantages of Mathematica. However, to improve, I think it's better to have some way to simply some of the codes in Mathematica. Anyway, as the users, that's also not a problem. Mathematica, simply one of the most powerful software we are using.

Pluspunten: Mathematica is the go-to software when manipulating mathematical expressions that must be solved, simplified, visualized, modelled, etc. It defines an entire language dedicated to writing expressions precisely, with the option to write them with math symbols (e.g. sum, product, etc) or more similar to other programming language. Particularly useful is the symbolic differentiation feature, which is easy and intuitive to use.
Many more advanced and domain-specific features are available, and keep being added at each release (yearly). There is a 'cloud' version of the software which can run Mathematica notebooks in the browser, making it possible to make quick checks without a full installation.

Minpunten: The Wolfram language's syntax and patterns is unlike any that I've seen, and so becoming proficient with Mathematica isn't just a matter of a few hours. Thankfully, the built-in help (reference manual) and tutorials are of great quality, and come with many practical example. The dedicated StackExchange community is also a great resource. Contributing to the difficulty is the fact that certain expressions will be handled (e.g. simplified or factorized) by Mathematica more easily than others, even though it feels like they should be equivalent. It is sometimes necessary to expand an expression, then simplify and factor it again in order to solve it again. Despite the support for many, many domain-specific features, working with vectors and matrices is still painful. When not part of a university or ineligible for discounts, the price may be high, depending on the intended use.

Pluspunten: The most critical feature of Mathematica (and Wolfram products in general) is that everything is seamlessly perfectly integrated. Everything is curated and maintained up to date.
Competing platforms like Matlab sure offer a larger set of functionalities, but the integration of the many "packages" is too often very poor.
In Mathematica, every package is fully integrated with the rest of the platform like no other software. Maybe you can say that Labview somehow reaches the same level of integration.
Mathematica is a very flexible and multi-purpose software language that can be used for programming pretty much anything.
New functionality like "Cloud-deploy" allow anybody to run algorithm made in Mathematica from anywhere in the world, from any device, with the only need of having an internet connection and a compatible browser.

Minpunten: Some secondary functionalities like the Presentation notebook are not so well developed, yet. That said, I doubt many will ever use it.

Opmerkingen: Well my study sessions are way more effective, almost every question is answered by Wolfram. My grades are doing well, can't exclude Wolfram for that, this software has helped me a lot through the University and I'm super satisfied with it.

Pluspunten: Everything you need regarding math is in there: derivatives, integrals, closed integrals, matrix and vector operations... The list goes on and on! I really this program has helped me countless times with Calculus study sessions and passing through linear algebra courses. The procedure is printed in a ordered way and it does it step by step.

Minpunten: The UI and operation input should and could be way better. I've used Symbolab and other apps and they are way better than Wolfram's input system. Please change it! Would really love to see you guys actually improve that.