I've been running Wolfram in my Jupyter environment lately, which is a nice setup to do quick analysis without the hell is Mathematica licensing.
I think it’s fine that wolfram invented it, but it would be more impactful how more common and certainly more approachable techniques could further the computational essay.
>Let's go back to the beginning: when I started IPython in late 2001, I was a graduate student in physics at CU Boulder, and had used extensively first Maple, then Mathematica, both of which have notebook environments. I also used Pascal (earlier) then C/C++, but those two (plus IDL for numerics) were the interactive environments that I knew well, and my experience with them shaped my views on what a good system for everyday scientific computing should look like. In particular, I was a heavy user of the Mathematica notebooks and liked them a lot.
[0] http://blog.fperez.org/2012/01/ipython-notebook-historical.h...