It doesn't make sense even for academia. Reproducibility is an issue and as we've seen with recent fraudulent claims in major publications - it's what is going to be used for verification of research.
Many years back while in grad school I could not reproduce a result from a paper. Thankfully they had provided the data as public but not the code. I emailed the authors and got some matlab code back. My university didn't have a matlab subscription. Octave saved me there since the syntax is similar.
But with something like mathematica and the price of it you will never be able to have a wide verification of the result if the software is not free.
Also, a lot of things in industry gain traction first in academia (especially math tools). So unless academic traction is dealt with mathematica's headway in industry will remain limited. They are still a profitable company. So I'm guessing there are deep pocketed clients who purchase the tooling.
The situation you’re describing is probably why Python is the defacto language of Machine Learning to this day.
I've noticed an increase in Rust, and I just googled it (for whatever that's worth) it seems to be #2 tied with C++ wont be surprised if it surpasses C++ and eventually gets tied with Python.
CUDA Oxide is only at 0.2, and NVidia has almost two decades to catch up, same with other "Python" frameworks that are basically bindings to C++ frameworks.
Even the Python GPU JITs only started to be invested seriously by the big three last year.
It will take a while.
As opposed to what?
Mathematica or MATLAB
This problem is very visible in Physics with software such as COMSOL, which many papers use. The licenses are so crazy expensive, that verifying any paper is difficult.
Mathematica has a lot of clients in math and engineering. Traditionally these clients are not so concerned about software engineering issues you mention. What Mathematica offers also makes sense for small firms with a few engineers, because they can leverage their vast amount of ready to use functions and libraries. But I agree that for medium to large size companies it stops making sense.
True but also for a one of piracy exists just use a cracked copy of it and be done with it
Not practical in research. Doesn't solve the blackbox reproducibility problem. Also it makes the act of publishing a paper under your name practically a crime confession, as it's easy for companies to comb the literature to seek people publishing results obtained with software X without a license.
How do you run cracked/pirated copies of software? I stopped pirating software decades ago due to malware risks.
Download the installer itself in the official way. Run the keygen in a virtual machine.
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