I don't understand why people think that Mathematica is expensive. Sure, a full commercial license is not cheap, but if you have one of these licenses, you (probably) have a job and the time saved by using Mathematica makes it worth every penny.

I have been using Mathematica since version 1.1, with a commercial license. Granted, the initial cost was about $800 (from MacConnection, if anyone else remembers those times), and the cost for premier service over the years has been much more.

I did a quick price check, and the cost for a student or home-use license is in the neighborhood of $1 (US) a day. Premier service is less than that.

What you are paying for is, essentially, the cost for the R&D and new ideas that are in Mathematica/Wolfram language that are not part of (most) of the 'free' software out there. Wolfram Language is not like languages like c or Fortran, which have a small core, and the user is expected to add (by purchase or writing code) all the extra bits. When I was writing code in c, (before Xcode), what I purchased was the compiler, linker, and IDE (in CodeWarrior or Lightspeed c, for example), not the language itself. With Mathematica, the core language is not really separable from the IDE -- or as it is called, the notebook interface, plus all the access to data (Knowledge Base) and libraries.

In essence, Mathematica gives me a team of collaborators to work on my projects. I have people who can solve PDEs and Machine Learning problems. Do you think that any of the fancy mathematical algorithms in Wolfram Language would even exist if it were not for the efforts of Wolfram Research. (The same can be said I am sure for the nifties in Maple and MatLab.) This type of functionality is not in R or Python. I am happy to pay my license fee so that these people can continue their work.

My opinion is that if you can afford to buy a computer capable of running Mathematica, the incremental cost -- a dollar a day -- to use Mathematica is cheap. Plus, there is always the Raspberry pi and the free versions of Mathematica on-line, although someone is probably paying more for internet access than it would cost to have a desktop version.

I am also aware of the digital divide in the US (and elsewhere) where a substantial percentage of the population cannot afford a computer or internet access. Wolfram Research cannot wave a magic wand and make these problems disappear, and it is my understanding that the Wolfram Foundation is working to reduce the digital divide.

I really do not understand why people think software should be free. Someone has to write it, test it, document it, etc. People working on bits and pieces of a system (linux, for example) in their spare time, are providing a service, but they cannot hold a candle to what a team of professionals who are paid to work on a project can do. Perhaps people think that clothes should be free, or food. Think of what you do: would be ok if the product of your work was free, which would necessarily mean that you would be providing the sweat of your brow for nothing.

Just because the marginal cost of software is (almost) nothing, does not mean that the fixed costs are similarly small. As software become more sophisticated, the fixed costs for any software, let alone anything a complex as Mathematica is huge, and continues to get more expensive.

Anyway, my 2 cents.

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.