I am STEM educator at a small private school in the United States and have been a user of Mathematica and now the Wolfram Language for many years. Over the past 4 years I have been trying to integrate the Wolfram Language into our curriculum but the administration will not commit to purchasing a site license. The stated reasons are:

1. There are free options which can accomplish the computational thinking goals in our curriculum just as effectively as the Wolfram Language. For example Python at Carnegie Melon, Java at Khan Academy, etc. or a general workflow using Jupyter Notebooks with associated libraries.
2. I am the only person that really knows WL here.

I hope that Wolfram Technologies continues to innovate and thrive as a business and I don't know what the business would look like if they were to freely provide the software for education purposes. Maybe corporate and government contracts would not be enough for the company to thrive.

My opinion is that if Wolfram were to freely provide the software for education, the exposure of this powerful language and programming paradigm would drastically increase the number of people that routinely use it. At some point the reasons stated above would completely go away.

For #1, the WL could be the free popular choice used to train computational thinking/coding. Everybody is trying to create a stand alone coding environment for the purpose of education including institutions like CMU and online platforms like Khan Academy. Wolfram Technologies has had this idea since launch 30 years ago and has indeed developed a most capable version of this environment. My opinion is that the choice to use WL would be the obvious choice. Additionally, the solution to reason #1 would auto fix #2.

I understand that Wolfram Tech is taking measures to increase awareness like WL for developers and the ability to incorporate WL into Jupyter Notebooks. However, WL users like me know that the full experience and power of the language comes from the interplay between front end and engine. So for me WL means both Mathematica FE and the Engine and that is the exposure I want my students to have. IMO, that is primarily what sets WL apart from everything else.

Well, I could take this conversation in many directions, but I think I'll just stop.

JM

Fast forward 10 months:

This year I exclusively used the Wolfram Language in back to back semester long Introductory programming courses. I had the students create their own free account and we used Stephen's textbook "An Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language" as our guide. All of the computations were done in the free version of the cloud and students were able to post their notebooks for my review on Schoology, our learning management system. The project was largely successful. My impression as to what is pedagogically possible for free has been changed. The students ran into very few limitations and these limitations did not surface until late in the course(web deployments). We did several small group projects including the building of a Scrabble helper bot and a code breaker for the Caesar cypher.(adapted from the AI League). My school demographics include over 20 countries represented and a wide range of exposure to programming ideas and languages. Some of the student feedback:

• The Wolfram language is quite "intuitive". "The functions usually do what you think they might do and this helped me learn things quicker"
• "The documentation is really useful."
• "I wish we spent more time building user interfaces and games."
• "EIWL is too focused on math"

We covered Lessons 1-20, 23-32, 34, 36, 38-40, 44. Well, tomorrow we talk about Import/Export(lesson 44) but as is usually the case this will not be the first time we use these functions. I supplemented EIWL with Project Euler challenges from time to time and we needed to Import and curate data earlier.

I am formally a math/physics teacher and if I get the opportunity to do more coding classes in the future, I will not hesitate to use the WL again.

Nico:

WARNING: Below is my opinion based on my personal experiences. I know that we are all different. In can only speak for myself.

These types of discussions help me to put things into perspective as I put proposals together for how to spend our limited resources. I hope others (including Wolfram) will share their experiences and thoughts as well.

Thanks for the great question Nico.

This is a great question and one I have struggled with with many vendors.

For me, it keeps coming back to the following question:

Does this vendor's business model work for me?

I have to say that I have passed on many great products because the vendor's business model would cost much more than the value I realize given my current use cases. And to be honest, for many years, there were no budgets for tools, so I was often stuck with what we had and what we could get for free. I do not mean to bash any particular vendor, so I'm not going to name specific products or their makers.

While I would love for all of the tools that Wolfram makes were less expensive, I want Wolfram to do more than just succeed. I want them to thrive, to innovate, to continue making my life easier and more productive (if a bit frustrating at times).

I think it is great that the Wolfram Engine is now free. This is a big deal for my use cases. A free engine will allow me to deploy Wolfram-based workflows as easily, and at the same cost, that I can deploy workflows with PowerShell, R, and other tools.

I don't mind paying (though I'd rather pay less) for Mathematica because Mathematica allows me to do much more than just design standard workflows. With Mathematica, I can:

• Do exploratory analytics in almost real-time with my business partners. For most questions, I no longer have to tell them that I'll have to get back to them later that day or week.
• Work transparently with business partners without that having to hand them 10 pages of SQL and an Excel workbook full of formulas that even if they could read, the don't have the time to do so.
• Build simple to complex cross-platform desktop, web and mobile apps that will delight users in hours, not days or weeks or months.

For most of my use cases, putting my data in the cloud is not an option. But I can imagine that for many use cases that would be a great lower-cost alternative. But, of course, you are then reliant on having internet connectivity, which is something that is not always true.

Unfortunately, we are not always able to afford a product just because the benefits will more than cover the costs. We have to be able to afford the product to begin with and we have to sell the product to the decision makers.

For my current challenges, I think Wolfram has struck a good balance:

• Power Users and Developers need Mathematica (and we only have a few of those)
• We can deploy/publish solutions via email, PDF, Excel, Wolfram Player, Wolfram Cloud (when allowed)
• We can automate the publishing results to other tools such as Power BI, Tableau, Google Sheets, Office, etc.
• A mostly consistent and evolving environment that doesn't require me to learn and keep up with a dozen or more opinionated packages that are all changing (and breaking things) on their own schedules.

I'm looking forward to reading how others feel on this topic.

Stay safe.

Mike