yeah the Wolfram ecosystem is actually pretty interesting! I think Wolfram just gets a bad rap (they’re closed source which some people dislike) but they’ve done sustained R&D here while being an independently owned company. Also — as someone who wants to bridge the data science tooling community with the tools of thought one, I’ve rarely found people overlapping / interested in both for some reason.

It’s a system for running mathematics, which in itself is extremely useful. However, I’ve never met anyone in all my time in mathland who experienced a new mathematical thought in Mathematica.

I used to use it to “run” / generate examples for proofs back in college

The thinking tools community happens to be on the wrong side of the walled garden. Wolfram|Alpha has potential to be a nice gate on that garden, but at some point at least, using it seemed a little upsell scammy. A thing that surprises me slightly seeing some knowledge workers who try Matlab or Mathematica is that they sit down and just think that they should be able to use the thing. (On this front, Wolfram|Alpha input is the one thing that comes close. You type in a simplified version of what you want to ask to lookup the obscure syntax for doing that sort of calculation.) On the other hand, people familiar with CAD, 3d modeling, any computer art tool, have a much better feel for learning curves. Though, like anyone, they're liable to think people get more than they do. An architect friend was just complaining about some line-stopping mistakes their structural engineer made while screen sharing just to show how bad it was, but honestly the pictures were entirely lost on me. Right or long, it looked like an incoherent jumble of lines. To my eyes, it looked like five floor-plans layered on top of each other. Partly it was, because some things were misaligned, the problem in the first place, but properly aligned it didn't look much different to the untrained.