The saddest thing about Mathematica is that despite the incredible level of effort invested into it by some of the smartest people on the planet, it will
inevitably be relegated to the dustbin of history.
As a proprietary language and kernel, it can never compete long-term with open source alternatives.
It's one thing to have a proprietary product, but for decades now proprietary languages have been a no-go for practically everyone. Even formerly closed languages have been opened sourced, such as Java and C#.
There is no other use for Wolfram Language scripts outside of Mathematica, which comes with a "license server". That's... a dead end.
Can I publish Wolfram code in Docker Hub and expect it to work (legally)? No.
Can I throw some Wolfram code into an Azure Function and have it compute something for me on demand? Nope.
Can I embed Wolfram code into a C# app, publish it on GitHub, and have other people be able to use it without forking out $thousands for a Mathematica license? Nope!
And on and on...
Python, Julia, and Jupyter notebooks will simply wipe out all usage of Mathematica outside of a few esoteric fields. As you said, they're all markedly inferior in almost every way, except for one critical one: they're open and extensible.
You mentioned AI/ML having stopped dead in Mathematica. I noticed that too. I wanted to test some GPU-hosted ML stuff recently that's not the standard Pytorch/Tensorflow type of thing, checked Mathematica, gave up, and I'm now using Julia.
If Mathematica was more open, there would be no "dead end" there, I could simply extend it. Or more importantly, other people would have already.
As a proprietary language and kernel, it can never compete long-term with open source alternatives.
It's one thing to have a proprietary product, but for decades now proprietary languages have been a no-go for practically everyone. Even formerly closed languages have been opened sourced, such as Java and C#.
There is no other use for Wolfram Language scripts outside of Mathematica, which comes with a "license server". That's... a dead end.
Can I publish Wolfram code in Docker Hub and expect it to work (legally)? No.
Can I throw some Wolfram code into an Azure Function and have it compute something for me on demand? Nope.
Can I embed Wolfram code into a C# app, publish it on GitHub, and have other people be able to use it without forking out $thousands for a Mathematica license? Nope!
And on and on...
Python, Julia, and Jupyter notebooks will simply wipe out all usage of Mathematica outside of a few esoteric fields. As you said, they're all markedly inferior in almost every way, except for one critical one: they're open and extensible.
You mentioned AI/ML having stopped dead in Mathematica. I noticed that too. I wanted to test some GPU-hosted ML stuff recently that's not the standard Pytorch/Tensorflow type of thing, checked Mathematica, gave up, and I'm now using Julia.
If Mathematica was more open, there would be no "dead end" there, I could simply extend it. Or more importantly, other people would have already.