Mathematica

What do you like best?

Mathematica is a great environment to create quick prototypes or to explore data with its powerful built in functions. Once you are very familiar with the language, it makes it very easy to pull big insights from data. It also has a simple to use documentation center, which allows you to see examples of every built in function.

What do you dislike?

Mathematica has a rather larger learning curve and it can take a time commitment up front to get up and running. It is also very difficult to build your own documentation for self-built functions.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Mathematica is a great language to use for many different applications since it is very powerful and versatile. It does take quite a learning curve, so you want to make sure you factor that learning time into whatever application you are using it for.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

I've been using Mathematica for data science as well as software development in the realm of machine learning. It is very convenient for data science since it is very easy to work with matrices and vectors in the Mathematica environment. The benefits for machine learning is that Mathematica is generic and list based, so you can store any combination of objects to a variable.