Wolfram Language Mathematica vs SageMath, Matlab, Python, Maxima

Wolfram Language Mathematica vs SageMath, Matlab, Python

People often ask me, how Wolfram Language Mathematica compares to SageMath or Matlab Octave Python or Macsyma Maxima?

If you are a young college student who need to do math homework sometimes, these can work.

If you are a professional or scientist working with math or engineering stuff often, Wolfram language is a magnitude better.

here's a short summary:

• Mathematica shines in symbolic computation, visualization, and has lots of specialized functions for machine learning, algorithms, chemistry, physics, engineering, etc.
• Matlab is pretty good if you mostly do numerical computation especially on matrices. (as opposed to symbolic solution or integral, etc other math equations.)
• Python is pretty good if you are doing mostly coding instead of interactive use, for numerical computation, matrices, statistics, machine learning.

• SageMath Macsyma Maxima, i cannot recommend at all. You waste time to get it to work than doing work.

You can get a rough sense of comparison by simply going to their websites. In particular, skip the marketing page and look at their documentation page. e.g. https://reference.wolfram.com/language/

Note: I get donation from Wolfram Research. I program Mathematica since 1992.