Mathematica is a great tool. But in my case, there are two huge pain points which limit my use of Mathematica:
1. Horrible REPL experience. Yes, the notebook interface can display graphics, cool. But I would take Emacs with paredit over it any day. After structurally manipulating Clojure code in Emacs with paredit, using the Mathematica interface is like a throwback to the 70s. You mean I need to balance and match my parentheses myself?! Seriously? Debugging larger expressions is like stabbing yourself in the eye with a dull spoon.
2. Badly designed data structures, specifically maps (also known as hashes or associative arrays). This is the most universal data structure, that can be used for almost anything, storing mappings from keys to values. Using maps in Mathematica is awkward and feels like doing precision watchwork in boxing gloves. I don't know why this doesn't get more love, after all if all your data fits in a matrix, Matlab is the competing tool, so better data structures would let Mathematica get a nice competitive advantage.
If these two areas were improved, I would likely subscribe to Mathematica and use it much more.
1. Horrible REPL experience. Yes, the notebook interface can display graphics, cool. But I would take Emacs with paredit over it any day. After structurally manipulating Clojure code in Emacs with paredit, using the Mathematica interface is like a throwback to the 70s. You mean I need to balance and match my parentheses myself?! Seriously? Debugging larger expressions is like stabbing yourself in the eye with a dull spoon.
2. Badly designed data structures, specifically maps (also known as hashes or associative arrays). This is the most universal data structure, that can be used for almost anything, storing mappings from keys to values. Using maps in Mathematica is awkward and feels like doing precision watchwork in boxing gloves. I don't know why this doesn't get more love, after all if all your data fits in a matrix, Matlab is the competing tool, so better data structures would let Mathematica get a nice competitive advantage.
If these two areas were improved, I would likely subscribe to Mathematica and use it much more.