I'm curious what people use Mathematica for. I know some people who use it academically. Does anyone use it in a non-academic professional context? I'd be interested to hear from anyone who does, what they are using it for.
I have a non-commercial license that I use personally. The appeal of mathematica is that it has a library already built into it for just about everything which lets you quickly prototype and reason about fairly complex cross domain problems and then easily visualize them.
Mathematica unfortunately has a lot of warts and rough edges clustered in specific fields (low level cryptography and binary manipulation heavy algorithms) which makes working with it a pain in the ass if you touch those fields regularly but outside of those specific fields it's fantastic.
And I can claim praise doubly so if you get the System Modeler/Modelica license as well. With those two together you can model a project using analog circuits, digital circuits, software running on hardware/RTOS, pneumatics, hydraulics, CFD, multibody physics, etc all running in a unified environment. And then of course from a high level you can tune parameters that drive all the parts of your model and test out swapping in different parts or running under different conditions.
You can do all the stuff that Mathematica and System Modeler are good for with other software packages cobbled together but that takes a lot more time to do and the integrations tend to not be nearly as clean. The only other product package on the market that compares would be MathWork's MATLAB + Simulink. The main difference being that Mathwork's products are more comprehensive in what all they cover but they tend to be less pleasant to work with.
You can do almost all of what you might do in Simulink or System Modeler in the VHDL-AMS simulator that comes with the Siemens (formerly Mentor) pcb design and layout packages, plus you can directly use SPICE models, VHDL models, and linear s-parameter models. You won’t get the control design tools of Simulink or the filter synthesis tools of a serious RF design package, though. There is a freely accessible web version here, thought, for the curious:
Yep. You can also do most of it or even all of it with a number of other tools as well.
IMHO the main sell is that you can do "all of the above" regardless of what domains you are working with without having to switch tools or negotiate different formats, etc.
So a systems engineer can model, simulate, and build a test framework for a project for all the bits (including the inside of the hardware and the physical world around it) without changing tools.
In the company I work for, I was using Mathematica as a general scripting language, for designing algorithms, plotting data in 2D/3D, photo/video editing , and some occasional algebraic manipulations. Sadly the company did not renew the license because they needed to cut costs. They asked me to port all my tooling to other languages and tools: now I have a mixture of python, matplotlib/gnuplot, ruby, maxima, ffmpeg, imagemagik and octave. So far good but I preferred to have everything under one GUI/interface and Mathematica was giving me that.
I use it regularly. Mostly for visualization and prototyping ideas. I’ve tried over the years to replace it with Python/Sage, but the giant library of builtin functions always pulls me back. Plus, the lisp-ish language I prefer over Python. The visualization capabilities are quite nice too - not just data or function plots, but the ability to construct relatively complex graphics programmatically is quite useful. On a recent project where I needed to build some data structures for spatial processing in 3d, I was able to build a nice 3d visualization to help me debug my code by visualizing the calculations I was doing. I also really like the backwards compatibility of notebooks: I have mathematica notebooks dating back to the 90s, many of which still work fine (modulo some visual ugliness due to changes they made to layout and presentation over the decades). Few other tools have that longevity.
