Launching Version 13.0 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica
I&#x27;ve enjoyed developing in the language professionally for many years. Truly, few things allow as rapid prototyping with such efficacy for so few lines across so many domains in a unified interface. There are some brilliantly innovative things across the language and, once you really get into the weeds of how to write efficient functional code, some of the things you can do are incredible.<p>Two things, though. Firstly, they are very stubborn on condoning a community to coalesce around the language other than through &#x27;official&#x27; Wolfram channels. This comes from the big man himself, no doubt. As much as they want to drive adoption by coming up with (what they think are) &quot;cool&quot; sounding initiatives, they will never get devs to break from their core workflows and tools to do things the Wolfram way. There is no first-class support for daily-driver editing (vscode, emacs etc etc) for large-scale projects (other than an ancient eclipse package). Brenton Bostick at Wolfram has done some truly first class work in closing this gap though.<p>Secondly, this is the first major release that is a bit &#x27;ho-hum&#x27; for a while. And it&#x27;s reflective of the fact that whatever Stephen&#x27;s pet interests are at a particular point in time will get attention in a release. For example, V11 was huge on Machine Learning and AI...now it barely gets a mention or extra development. Because SW is so focused on his Physics Project, this will likley be the case for a while.<p>To anyone thinking about using the language -- dive in. It&#x27;s brilliant and expressive and <i>fun</i>. It&#x27;s satisfying. You can do cool stuff. It just becomes very difficult when you want to scale it.<p>Anyone from WRI reading this: please, please, please let the community develop organically and support the toolchain everyone has wanted for so long. Or don&#x27;t. But you need us more than we need you. Oh, and simplify the product line -- what a nightmare for newcomers to navigate. :-)