Hey, I am super exited about using these Spells that I have been working on for projects! First part of this post is gonna summarize the history of the University project so far.
Actually, the thing is it's compulsory for the 4th ( and final year) students to work on a project in their final year - it's named the "Major" project. But there was already a lot of practice during the "Minor" in the 3rd year. So during the minors ( 1 per semester ), I gradually moved the project towards the languages, of course, human languages;P
The thing is there is so much that can be done with in this context. From a programming point of view this involves heavy text processing and, among many other alternatives, some heavy statistical analysis.
As my skill in programming weren't very brushed at the time, I chose to go with the Closed-Source Computer Aided Mathematics system, Mathematica. I absolutely loved Mathematica, especially the vision of it's founder and CEO who himself is pretty awe-inspiring. The other big name in CAM's is of MATLAB but the Mathematica people seem to be more active in arousing interest in the people regarding the endless possibilities of creativity in Mathematics, once the drudgery and fear of "complex" things is removed.
I absolutely recommend that you have a look at the following links and would really encourage you to look up more videos by Stephen Wolfram and even to find out more about his background. One person, I find who believes in what he says.
Besides, the Mathematica language is being distributed free with Raspberry Pi systems. So, apart from the official trial period you can just purchase a Raspberry Pi and have a good go at it.
And, I don't really believe in "Camps" as in Mathematica is "Good" or "Bad" for such and such reason. But I would definitely look it up thoroughly and decide for my own whether it suits my purpose.
If money is not an issue and you have only to do preliminary research with Computers and not willing to really understand how the internals work, then Mathematica is definitely worth looking into.
Hey, What about SageMaths?
Obviously, I LOVE SageMaths and I have no doubt in my mind that you are definitely gonna see SageMaths speeding up and innovating ever more. It's free and it's driven by people who are passionate about it. I would bet on passionate hobbyists any day of my life. Stephen Wolfram is one person who makes his presence felt as the face of Mathematica and his visions for the possible uses of CAM software is mind-blowing. SageMaths is driven by people from all over the world, yup everywhere. Like Linux and Android - any innovation made anywhere would be a contribution to the system as a whole.
But the thing is, for that Minors I relied on the immense simplicity of Mathematica 'cos I only had a faint idea about Sage and wasn't really willing to code. Reason being, the University study is something I find to be utterly boring and it fails to inspire me at all levels - my main interest was to be able to work with Human languages, which is another one of my Great Loves.
Needless to say that Mathematica made it possible for me to work up the project in a short time without investing much time into getting the know-how. I barely looked at the Official Tutorial 'cos most of the functions that I needed were built in, the visualization ability is breath-taking and it even suggested the commands as I typed them in. It was like something from the future to me, as I was totally ignorant of the progresses made to facilitate coding but hey, we are all crazy and stupid when we don't know something;P
So, the projects worked out good and I grew more confident with my programming skills)
But, apart from the project work where else could I use Mathematica?
The honest answer would be, nowhere!
Once you get addicted to this Closed-Source system you would obviously appreciate the programming challenges more 'cos you know there would be a function somewhere. But what if you are supposed to solve a problem, say on some programming competition or even understand the fundamentals of how the entire thing works - you would hit the dead end.
It's not about the FOR loops or even the IF-ELSE ladder that constitutes programming. To understand how the entire thing works one needs to be able to look under the hood i.e. the Source Code. Good luck doing that with a Closed-Source system!!
Besides when one needs to work on complex problems it's often necessary to optimize the code to use the full power of the Hardware, which again, requires an access to the inner workings of the system.
As far as Raspberry Pi is concerned, the official recommendation for the Magic to really work - Python.
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