Mathematica is an insidious pox on the research community. Research needs to be open and verifiable, not obfuscated and closed. If the system you are using to perform calculations is just a giant black box, it&#x27;s often extremely difficult to understand what is actually going on under the hood, which makes it very difficult to check for mistakes.<p>Here&#x27;s a good reddit thread about some really terrible arithmetic errors in mathematica: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;math&#x2F;comments&#x2F;2kjyrc&#x2F;known_error_in_mathematica_has_not_been_fixed_in&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;math&#x2F;comments&#x2F;2kjyrc&#x2F;known_error_in_m...</a><p>As a computer scientist doing physics research, I don&#x27;t understand how my colleagues put up with the terrible trifecta of mathematica, matlab, and labview.  These are some of the lowest-quality and most frustrating pieces of software I have ever had to put up with, yet they are ubiquitous in many research communities. There are vastly superior solutions that are free, open-source, and, as far as I can tell, much easier to use.<p>Every day I see students and researchers struggling to circumvent the idiosyncratic and senseless designs of these softwares. I think it might just be a vicious cycle of professors only knowing shitty software, so the students only use shitty software, don&#x27;t learn good software, become professors, and the cycle repeats.