As a long time Mathematica (MMA) user I can say I am confused and bemused as to where Wolfram is heading. They have their fingers in so many pies its hard to work out whats going on.
Recent Wolfram marketing on MMA/Wolfram language seem to be aimed at consumer, Facebook and Hedgefund users rather than their traditional base in the Sciences and Engineering.
There are plenty of pretty short examples, but the MMA kernel grinds to a halt when pushing into larger problem sets. The CUDA and Parallel processor commands are limited and haven't really been updated in the last few years (pushing you back to other tools).
Developing on Workbench is anything but a joy and without even considering speed one is better off developing on a regular programming IDE for programs requiring multiple libraries. The notebook interface just doesn't handle large programs well.
While functional programming is wonderful for some things, it is incredibly hard to debug with the current tools and effectively provides a level of self obfuscation when used exclusively.
The Computable Document Format (CDF) is a nice idea but the licensing terms are too restrictive for any commercial work. At present CDF also has a pretty slow, buggy interpreter.
All that said MMA is a great tool for early prototyping and a wide range of analysis, you just need to consider switching to something else if you get over several pages of code or utilize more than a few of your own libraries.
Like others have said, there are lots of tools out there and a combination of them will still be needed to produce the best outcome after the release of MMA10 and the Wolfram Cloud.
Recent Wolfram marketing on MMA/Wolfram language seem to be aimed at consumer, Facebook and Hedgefund users rather than their traditional base in the Sciences and Engineering.
There are plenty of pretty short examples, but the MMA kernel grinds to a halt when pushing into larger problem sets. The CUDA and Parallel processor commands are limited and haven't really been updated in the last few years (pushing you back to other tools).
Developing on Workbench is anything but a joy and without even considering speed one is better off developing on a regular programming IDE for programs requiring multiple libraries. The notebook interface just doesn't handle large programs well.
While functional programming is wonderful for some things, it is incredibly hard to debug with the current tools and effectively provides a level of self obfuscation when used exclusively.
The Computable Document Format (CDF) is a nice idea but the licensing terms are too restrictive for any commercial work. At present CDF also has a pretty slow, buggy interpreter.
All that said MMA is a great tool for early prototyping and a wide range of analysis, you just need to consider switching to something else if you get over several pages of code or utilize more than a few of your own libraries.
Like others have said, there are lots of tools out there and a combination of them will still be needed to produce the best outcome after the release of MMA10 and the Wolfram Cloud.