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Comment by jbclements | Hacker News Reader

I have a lot of bones to pick with Mathematica, but calling it "clunky" seems like a stretch; my experience suggests that mathematica is the exact opposite of clunky; it has so much silky chrome that I feel like it's completely lost touch with its declarative core (if it ever had one).

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My experience with mathematica is that it becomes unwieldy as soon as you try to build something non-trivial. But I don't have more that a few semesters of use here-and-there during undergraduate studies.

I feel the same way about MATLAB too, though. For better or worse, I was attracted to a Python scientific computing stack pretty early on.

I'm not sure that you are supposed to use Mathematica to "build" things. It's not that kind of programming language. Its designed-for use case is as a cognitive/computational aid in attacking a specific problem one time, and then having a record of your work. Not so much building software for repeated execution.

A large part of Mathematica is written in the Wolfram Language so I'm reasonably confident that it is intended to be used for building real things.

You have to be able to think in Mathematica, which takes some getting used to. If know what you're doing, you can write extremely expressive (and compact) code. I've seen demos by my lecturers and it's amazing what you can do in a few lines.

It suffers a little from the same sort of thing as Python: there is almost certainly a canonical, beautiful way of doing what you want to do, but you're going to have to sift through documentation to find it.

Yah, Mathematica is pretty much a write-only language...

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