On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 3:42 AM, Dr. David Kirkby <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote: > If you believe what Wolfram Research say, there are several million > Mathematica > users. See for example > > http://www.wolfram-media.com/products/mathematicabook.html > > where it says about a book: > > "The definitive reference and tutorial for several million enthusiastic > Mathematica users around the world" > > There are several things that make me question the truth of this. One, > admittedly not very sophisticated metric, suggests the number of *active* > Mathematica users might be only 1.71 that of Sage! > > First, why do I not believe this several million number? > > 1) As an engineer, working in several companies over the years, I've seen very > little usage of it. Plenty in academia, but little outside. > > 2) Do a job search on monster.com and see how many jobs require Mathematica > knowledge. Then compare it to MATLAB, and you will find far more companies > want > MATLAB skills than want Mathematica. If there were several million users, I > would expect to be able to find lots of jobs requiring Mathematica skills. > > 3) WRI come out with a lot of ****, like for example that publishing a > 'Demonstration' on > > http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/index.html > > counts as an academic publication! See the FAQ at > > http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/FAQ.html > > where it says: > > --------------------------------------------------- > Question. Do Demonstrations count as academic publications? > > Answer. Yes. Every Demonstration undergoes a rigorous review process that > checks > for quality, clarity, and accuracy, so you can count them as academic > publications.
Wow. LOL. > --------------------------------------------------- > > It sure would be easy to get a lot of publications and a chair if one could > write papers as simple as this demo! > > http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/SineAndCosineGraphGenerator/ > > So how can one judge the popularity of Sage vs Mathematica? Well, given they > both have one main public support forum: > > Sage - sage-supp...@googlegroups.com > Mathematica - comp.soft-sys.math.mathematica > > a comparison of the number of recent posts to these forums might give us a > clue. > (Can anyone find a better way? Is this a totally flawed metric?). Here's another metric that I like, which measures number of users. At http://www.wolfram.com/company/background.html they say "With a tightly knit core of fewer than 500 employees ....". So, let's assume 1. 500 employees 2. Each employee costs WRI $150K/year on average (including benefits, etc.) 3. An average Mathematica user pays $100/license. This includes site licenses, which might cover 100 active users (say, at a uni) and cost $10K, say. That gives about 750,000 active users: 500*150000/100 = 750000 This is not so far of from Wolfram's claims. Last time I did this calculation (in mid 2007), the Wolfram page listed 550 employees... and when I talked to Eric Weisstein in January 2008 at the AMS meeting he said they had been hiring a lot of new people. Given the current statement of "less than 500 employees", it looks like they may have had some significant layoffs, due to the financial climate in 2008-2009. By the way, there are I think about 1500 fulltime employees at the company that makes MATLAB. -- William -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
