Extending Van Gogh’s Starry Night with Inpainting
Mathematica demos sure look pretty [0]. But I recently tried to get actual work done with Mathematica and found the experience utterly ridiculous.The high level functions, while nice for demos, never quite do what you need. Want to display data vs. time with errorbars around the data? Sorry, no function for this completely exotic use case, please hack a DateListPlot on top of an ErrorListPlot [1].The WolframAlpha integration "transparently" interprets code for you in the background. This interpretation can change any day [2] and leaves you guessing why your notebook doesn't run anymore.The bugs I encountered were severe: One of the output function swallows the "-" sign if the result is between -1 and 0 [3]. Currently I am battling file corruption of notebooks that are saved on network drives and open while the drive is disattached/reattached.Had it not been for the awesome support by the mathematica. stackexchange.com community, I would have quit Mathematica completely. Now I vowed to use it only for small hacks. And, if I want to impress someone, for demos.[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjCWdsrVcBM[1] http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/18962[2] The input    Quantity[1, "Kelvins"]

is interpreted by Mathematica itself and yields an object equivalent to "1 Kelvins". The input    Quantity[1, "Kelvin"]

however is interpreted "transparently" by Wolfram Alpha. A few weeks ago it evaluated to "1 KelvinsDifference", but now has changed to "1 Kelvins". Don't get me started on the KelvinsDifference vs. Kelvins thing, which are both represented by the same symbol to maximize your confusion when your unit conversions are failing...[3] http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/65600