Wolfram Language is insanely great. I've been using wolframscript as (i) a shell replacement and (ii) a piping/glue language for larger projects.
Wolframscript makes this hard though for the following two reasons: (i) wolframscript requires users to login before any script can be ran; (ii) only 1 wolframscript REPL can be open at a time.
(i) makes it impossible to export wolframscripts to users who don't know what wolframscript is. For example, if I'm using wolframscript as a build tool for a larger Haskell project, and some user downloads my software, they'll first have to login to Wolfram Cloud before the wolframscript is able to run. There's no way I'm going to force people to do that, so it hinders the growth of the language.
(ii) makes it hard to use wolframscript as a complete terminal replacement.
People often use multiple terminals at once, at different locations in the file system. Wolframscript only allows once at a time.
Wolfram Language is insanely good. It should be more popular than Python. I think fixing some of these licensing/login issues could help it grow.
It's hard to come up with a short answer to explain the greatness of the tightly integrated system with tons of functionality and highly sophisticated function/rule based programming style, but let me give you a quick taste of it: the following code
will create and deploy a publicly accessible web form that asks for 3 coefficients and plots a parabola. How many lines of code / external libraries would you need to do the same thing in python?
Cool! Is it because the Wolfram libraries and infrastructure are great, or is there something in the semantics of the language that makes this so nice?
For me, it’s a combination of many many convenient built-in functions, and high level constructs for functional and rule-based programming. I recently played with the language to get functionality similar to what R’s dplyr provides - it can give a sense of what kind of advanced “meta-programming” is possible.
Wolframscript makes this hard though for the following two reasons: (i) wolframscript requires users to login before any script can be ran; (ii) only 1 wolframscript REPL can be open at a time.
(i) makes it impossible to export wolframscripts to users who don't know what wolframscript is. For example, if I'm using wolframscript as a build tool for a larger Haskell project, and some user downloads my software, they'll first have to login to Wolfram Cloud before the wolframscript is able to run. There's no way I'm going to force people to do that, so it hinders the growth of the language.
(ii) makes it hard to use wolframscript as a complete terminal replacement. People often use multiple terminals at once, at different locations in the file system. Wolframscript only allows once at a time.
Wolfram Language is insanely good. It should be more popular than Python. I think fixing some of these licensing/login issues could help it grow.