> It probably would be even more niche today - and worse.
Maybe, but a better successor would've evolved out of it.
Matlab had Octave as an open source alternative. Not used much, but it inspired the creation of Julia. Based on how fast it's evolving Julia will be the superpowered-grandson-of-Matlab :)
The Mathematica/Wolfram bloodline will unfortunately die off at some point... lots of ideas will be lost and time will have to be spent to reinvent them from scratch atop a different platform... sigh...
(Kind of reminds of the Smalltalk story... in the 80-90s Java won bc. all the practically usable Smalltalk implementations were closed-source and had very bad pricing... We could've had much better OO+interactive languages instead if an open-and-free alternative of it existed... Instead we have ugly Java/C# or slow Ruby in that space.)
Forgetting that Java tool vendors are ex-Smalltalkers?
Including the JIT and GC that powers OpenJDK, which was only made freely available on Java 6 version.
Also that Sun went bankrupt trying to push Java everywhere, while the other Java vendors (and Microsoft with .NET Core), learned to only open the core part, while the crown jewels are kept commercial.
> Maybe, but a better successor would've evolved out of it.
> Matlab had Octave as an open source alternative. Not used much, but it inspired the creation of Julia. Based on how fast it's evolving Julia will be the superpowered-grandson-of-Matlab :)
That's a very contrived argument!
If Matlab has inspired the development of other products without ceasing to exist so can (maybe has) Mathematica.
Maybe, but a better successor would've evolved out of it.
Matlab had Octave as an open source alternative. Not used much, but it inspired the creation of Julia. Based on how fast it's evolving Julia will be the superpowered-grandson-of-Matlab :)
The Mathematica/Wolfram bloodline will unfortunately die off at some point... lots of ideas will be lost and time will have to be spent to reinvent them from scratch atop a different platform... sigh...
(Kind of reminds of the Smalltalk story... in the 80-90s Java won bc. all the practically usable Smalltalk implementations were closed-source and had very bad pricing... We could've had much better OO+interactive languages instead if an open-and-free alternative of it existed... Instead we have ugly Java/C# or slow Ruby in that space.)