plasmon

I think one of my biggest hot takes is that, if the google lawsuit is successful—and I'm praying that it is—Wolfram should have a similar antitrust lawsuit. Mathematica is an incredibly impressive program, but it's also basically the only viable computer algebra system for general purpose uses, unlike, for example, MatLab, which can easily be substituted with something like Octave or Julia for numerical computing—Wolfram has a gigantic monopoly on symbolic computation software, and open source alternatives are either largely specialized, or woefully lagging behind. (Yes, I know that SymPy is pretty good, but it's also nowhere near as comprehensive as Mathematica; Maxima is also pretty good, but I don't have much experience with it.)